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1  1  1  III  riTitiTHi 

Prtttrptntt  UttturrBttg 


THE  LOUIS  CLARK  VANUXEM  FOUNDATION 
LECTURES  FOR  1922 


THE  LOUIS  CLARK  VANUXEM  FOUNDATION 
OF  PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY 

was  established  in  1912  with  a  bequest  of  $25,000  under  the  will 
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The  following  lectures  have  been  published: 

The  Theory  of  Permutable  Functions,  by  Vito  Volterra. 

Lectures  delivered  in  Princeton  in  connection  with  the  dedica- 
tion of  the  Graduate  College  of  Princeton  University,  by  Emile 
Boutroux,  Alois  Riehl,  A.  D.  Godley,  and  Arthur  Shipley. 

Romance,  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh. 

A  Critique  of  the  Theory  of  Evolution,  by  Thomas  Hunt  Mor- 
gan. 

Platonism,  by  Paul  Elmer  More. 

Human  Efficiency  and  Levels  of  Intelligence,  by  Henry  Herbert 
Goddard. 

Philosophy  and  Civilization  in  the  Middle  Ages,  by  Maurice 
De  Wulf . 

The  Defective  Delinquent  and  Insane,  by  Henry  A.  Cotton. 


Omai,  the  South   Sea  Islander. 

From   an   engraving  by   John   Jacobs,   after   a   portrait  by    Sir  Joshua   Reynolds. 


Louis  Clark  Vanuxem  Foundation 


NATURE'S   SIMPLE   PLAN 

A  PHASE  OF  RADICAL  THOUGHT  IN  THE 

MID-EIGHTEENTH  CENiliftV  ';  'v'  '    "  > 


BY 


CHAUNCEY  BREWSTER  TINKER 

PROFESSOR  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE  IN 
YALE  UNIVERSITY 


PRINCETON 
PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY  MILFORD 
OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

ig22 


-rS" 


-rXCHANGB 


Copyright,  1922 
Princeton  University  Press 


Published,  1922 
Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

In  this  study  of  the  theory  of  simplicity — the 
way  of  Nature — in  the  England  of  1770,  I  have 
begun  with  an  essay  intended  to  set  forth  the  gen- 
eral conviction  that  civilisation  had  somehow  or 
other  failed  of  its  goal — was  at  least  on  the  de- 
cline— and  that  primitive  man,  in  his  savage  or 
even  animal  state,  was  better  off  than  the  citi- 
zens of  Europe.  The  dream  of  a  finer  nation, 
conceived  in  simplicity  and  liberty,  in  which  the 
arts,  and  particularly  poetry,  might  flourish  as 
in  their  native  soil,  is  the  subject  of  the  paper  on 
Corsica  which  forms  the  second  essay. 

But  simplicity  is  not  of  the  future  only.  There 
must  have  been  a  time,  far  back  in  the  childhood 
of  the  nation,  when  untutored  genius  sang  forth 
its  passion  unrestrained  by  the  doctrines  of  the 
schools  and  the  narrowing  influence  of  caste; 
perhaps  even  now  such  bards  may  be  found  in 
some  remote  island.  The  third  essay  is  therefore 
entitled  Ancient  Bard  and  Gentle  Savage,  Per- 
haps, untrained  by  schools  and  free  from  the 
trammels  of  a  conscious  art,  which  is  ever  grow- 
ing more  artificial,  native  genius  may  even  now 
be  seeking  expression  in  poetry  rude  but  wildly 


vi  PREFATORY  NOTE 

sweet.     This  is  the  subject  of  the  last  essay  on 
the  Inspired  Peasant. 

The  phrase,  'Nature's  simple  plan,'  is  from  an 
anonjTTious  poem  on  Otaheite,  pubhshed  in  1774, 
a  phrase  which  was  evidently  part  of  the  literary 
jargon  of  the  day.  As  late  as  Wordsworth  we 
find  'Nature's  holy  plan'  {Lines  written  in  Early 
Spring)  and 'simple  plan'  {Rob  Roy) .  Numer- 
ous eighteenth  century  parallels  might  be  cited. 

My  choice  of  such  a  theme  at  this  particular 
moment  hardly  requires  comment. 

C.B.T. 
London,  January  11,  1922. 


NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE 

The  difference  between  the  savage  and  civi- 
lised state  of  man  has  been  much  considered  of 
late  years,  since  so  many  discoveries  of  distant 
regions  and  new  nations  have  been  made  under 
his  present  majesty's  jyatronage,  and  since  an 
eloquent  writer  upon  the  continent  and  even  a 
learned  judge  who  is  an  author  in  our  own  island 
have  thought  jit  to  maintain  the  siiperiority  of 
the  former, 

— Boswell,  Hypochondriack. 

In  the  spring  of  the  year  1773,  four  of  the 
most  distinguished  gentlemen  of  their  day,  who 
had  met  together  at  dinner,  were  engaged  in  dis- 
cussing a  topic  of  current  and  vital  interest.  The 
four  men  were  General  Oglethorpe  (the  host), 
Dr.  Samviel  Johnson,  James  Boswell  and  Oliver 
Goldsmith;  and  the  theme  of  their  conversation 
was  the  menace  of  luxury.  On  this  perennially 
engaging  topic  each  of  the  four  men  had  the 

1 


2  NiAli^RE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

cleai*est  (foiiviciibns^.but  neither  on  this  occasion 
nor  in  subsequent  discussions  did  they  discover  a 
common  ground  of  agreement.  Had  it  looked, 
at  any  moment,  as  though  they  might  attain  to 
an  easy  or  courteous  unanimity  of  opinion,  Bos- 
well  would  probably  have  thwarted  them;  for 
unanimity  puts  an  end  to  discussion,  and  it  was 
BoswelFs  office  to  keep  the  talk  going.  Johnson, 
of  course,  would  listen  to  no  denunciation  of  the 
age  in  which  he  lived;  but  Goldsmith  had  no  such 
loyalty.  He  expatiated  on  the  degeneracy  of  the 
nation,  and  assigned  as  the  cause  of  the  general 
decline  the  insidious  vice  of  luxury.  To  this 
Johnson  at  once  demurred,  contending  that  not 
only  were  there  as  many  tall  men  in  England  as 
ever — proof  that  the  national  stature  was  not  on 
the  decline — but  also,  since  luxury  could  reach 
but  few  persons,  it  was  no  real  menace.  *Lux- 
ury,'  he  said,  'so  far  as  it  reaches  the  poor,  will  do 
good  to  the  race  of  the  people :  it  will  strengthen 
and  multiply  them.  Sir,  no  nation  was  ever  hurt 
by  luxury.' 

The  words  of  General  Oglethorpe  on  this  oc- 
casion are  not  recorded,  but  in  a  subsequent  con- 
versation he  remarked,  as  an  old  soldier  might 
have  been  expected  to  do,  that,  inasmuch  as  what 
we  call  the  best  in  life  depends  upon  our  own  at- 
titude of  mind,  it  is  obviously  wrong  to  overesti- 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  3 

mate  the  physical  comforts  of  civilisation.  There- 
upon he  quoted  Addison's  description  of  the  Nu- 
midian  savage,  in  Cato : 

Coarse  are  his  meals,  the  fortune  of  the  chase, 
Amid  the  running  stream  he  slakes  his  thirst. 
Toils  all  the  day,  and  at  the  approach  of  night, 
On  the  first  friendly  bank  he  throws  him  down, 
Or  rests  his  head  upon  a  rock  till  morn ; 
And  if  the  following  day  he  chance  to  find 
A  new  repast  or  an  untasted  spring. 
Blesses  his  stars,  and  thinks  it's  luxury.^ 

On  tliis  occasion,  however,  it  was  Goldsmith  who 
denounced  modern  luxury  and  the  *  degenerate 
times  of  shame'  in  which  he  lived.  This  had,  in 
truth,  become  his  characteristic  vein,  though  per- 
haps not  his  genuine  conviction.  Three  years  be- 
fore, he  had  published  The  Deserted  Village,  in 
which,  to  use  his  own  words,  he  'inveighed  against 
luxury,'  and  in  which  he  had  proceeded  to  the 
melancholy  conclusion  that  the  rural  virtues  were 
deserting  England.  Piety,  Loyalty  and  faithful 
Love — to  make  use  of  those  allegorical  capitals 
which  the  age  affected — were  departing  with  the 
emigrants  to  America;  and  along  with  them — 
also  to  America — was  going  the  Muse  of  Poetry, 
to  whom,  at  the  end,  the  author  addresses  an  elo- 
quent though  mournful  farewell.     In  the  new 

1  The  lines  are  quoted  as  given  in  the  Life  of  Johnson  (Hill's 
ed.),  vol.  3,  p.  282. 


4  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

world,  the  Muse,  if  she  try  her  voice,  is  admon- 
ished to  teach  erring  man  a  lesson  (of  the  need 
of  which  the  poet  seems  to  have  had  a  prophetic 
realisation) — to  spurn  'the  rage  of  gain.' 

Teach  him  that  states  of  native  strength 

possest 
Though  very  poor,  may  still  be  very  blest. 

Perhaps,  as  I  have  intimated,  Goldsmith  was  less 
concerned  about  this  vice  of  luxury  than  lie 
liimself  was  aware,  for,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he 
cared  not  at  all  for  the  primitive  blessings  of 
rocky  pillow  and  untasted  spring  so  dear  to  Cato 
and  Oglethorpe.  He  loved  the  good  things  of 
civilisation  quite  as  well  as  did  his  friend  John- 
son, and,  in  truth,  sometimes  snatched  at  those 
beyond  his  reach.  Nevertheless  he  was  presum- 
ably sincere  in  his  view  that  poetry  flourishes  only 
in  a  civilisation  much  simpler  than  any  which  he 
had  known.  Men  like  Johnson  and  Goldsmith 
might,  one  would  suppose,  dismiss  the  decline  of 
civilisation  from  their  fears  if  it  concerned  noth- 
ing more  alarming  than  a  reduction  in  the  num- 
ber of  tall  men  or  an  increase  in  the  consumption 
of  tea  and  spirits;  but  it  was  a  vital  problem  in- 
deed if  the  production  of  poetry  and  the  arts  was 
to  be  hindered  by  the  national  love  of  luxury. 
Was  poetry  declining?  Had  it  become  artificial 
and  false?    Did  it  flourish  better  in  'a  state  of 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  5 

nature'  ?  These  were  the  really  important  aspects 
of  the  question.  Could  it  be  that  the  arts  are  not 
subject  to  human  control,  but  spring  up  natur- 
ally in  a  youtliful  civilisation?  If  so,  we  are 
forced  back  once  more  to  the  original  question,  Is 
civilisation  so  far  corrupted  that  art  no  longer 
springs  naturally  into  life? 

To  these  questions  no  simple  reply  could  be 
given.  To  follow  nature  is  obviously  desirable. 
A  'return  to  Nature,'  if  peradventure  we  have 
got  away  from  nature,  is  also  desirable ;  but  what 
is  the  state  of  nature,  and  how,  in  the  name  of 
all  that  is  reasonable,  are  we  to  return  to  it? 
There's  the  rub.  But,  surely,  people  may  move 
in  the  direction  of  simplicity  by  renouncing  the 
soft  indulgences  of  civilisation  that  have  proved 
most  perilous?  Savages,  peasants,  animals  even, 
may  serve  to  show  us  how  far  we  have  departed 
from  the  nonii.  To  such  questions  the  world  of 
1770  addressed  no  slight  or  casual  attention. 

Unrivalled  opportunities  were  now  offered  for 
a  comparison  of  savage  and  civilised  life.  The 
accession  of  George  III  had  been  marked  by  a 
sudden  development  of  the  geographical  and 
ethnographical  sciences.  The  single  decade  of 
the  'sixties  had  seen  the  expeditions  of  Commo- 
dore Byron,  Captain  Cartwright.  James  Bruce, 
Captain  Tobias  Furneaux,  Captam  Wallis,  and 


6  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Lieutenant  (later  Captain)  Cook.  In  1764  By- 
ron set  sail  for  the  southwest.  He  brought  home 
stories  of  a  race  of  splendid  giants  in  Patagonia, 
who  had  been  seen  by  the  sailors  as  they  were 
entering  the  Straits  of  Magellan.  Captain  Sam- 
uel Wallis  rediscovered  the  South  Sea  Isles,  and 
named  the  one  which  has  since  been  called  Ota- 
heite  and  Tahiti,  'King  George  Ill's  Island.' 
Captain  George  Cartwright,  who  lived  for  six- 
teen years  in  Labrador,  made  six  voyages  out  and 
back  during  that  time,  and  brought  home  with 
him  the  first  Esquimaux  who  ever  visited  Eng- 
land. James  Bruce  penetrated  into  Abyssinia, 
and  made  a  valuable  study  of  its  primitive  cul- 
ture. To  this  series  of  brilliant  explorations  the 
voyages  of  Captain  Cook,  which  began  in  1768, 
formed  the  splendid  climax. 

Along  with  the  interest  in  these  voyages  there 
grew  up  the  desire  to  see  and  study  man  in  his 
primitive  state.  It  was  recalled  that  Peter  the 
Wild  Boy  (known  to  Swift  and  Arbuthnot)  who 
had  been  caught  in  the  woods  near  Hanover  a 
generation  earlier,  was  still  living  in  England. 
He  was  sought  out  and  catechised  respecting  the 
state  of  nature;  but,  as  he  had  never  learned  to 
articulate  a  score  of  words,  not  much  of  value 
was  discovered.  There  was  a  Savage  Girl,  too, 
who  had  been  found  years  before  in  the  woods  of 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  7 

Champagne,  and  who  was  still  living  in  France. 
She  went  by  the  name  of  Mile.  Le  Blanc;  but 
this  sobriquet,  though  elegant,  was  a  little  inap- 
propriate, for  the  account  of  her  relates  that 
when  she  was  caught,  at  the  age  of  nine,  she 
*seemed  black;  but  it  soon  appeared  after  wash- 
ing her  several  times,  that  she  was  naturally 
white,  as  she  still  continues.'  The  girl  was  gen- 
erally thought  to  be  an  Esquimau,  who,  having 
been  sold  into  slavery,  escaped  from  her  captors 
or  was  abandoned  by  them,  and  ran  wild  in  the 
woods,  until  by  chance  she  reached  the  banks  of 
the  Mame,  where  she  was  finally  caught  by  some 
French  peasants.  She  must  have  sojourned  in 
the  wilderness  for  a  long  time,  probably  for  sev- 
eral years,  since,  when  she  was  discovered,  she 
had  lost  all  use  of  language  and  could  give  no 
rational  account  of  herself.  When  found,  she 
was  living  hke  a  wild  cat  in  a  tree.  The  account 
of  her,  pubhshed  by  M.  de  la  Condamine,  was 
translated  into  English  under  the  supervision  of 
the  Scottish  philosopher.  Lord  Monboddo,  and 
published,  with  a  preface  from  his  own  pen,  in 
the  year  1768.  It  is  a  readable  little  book,  though 
it  was  intended  by  the  editor  merely  as  a  docu- 
ment for  the  investigation  of  the  state  of  nature. 
He  laments  that,  when  he  saw  Mile.  Le  Blanc  in 
1765,  she  was  *in  a  poor  state  of  health,  having 


8  NATURE'S  SBIPLE  PLAN 

lost  all  her  extraordinary  bodily  facidties  [such 
as  incredibly  sharp  sight,  agility  in  swimming, 
and  speed  in  running]  and  retaining  nothing  of 
the  savage  but  a  certain  wildness  in  her  look  and 
a  very  great  stomach' ;  nevertheless  his  Lordship 
says  she  is  proof  that  'the  philosopher  will  dis- 
cover a  state  of  nature  very  different  from  what 
is  commonly  known  by  that  name.'  He  himself 
used  her  as  an  example  of  his  new  and  startling 
doctrine  that  mankind  has  passed  through  many 
stages,  'from  the  mere  animal  to  the  savage,  and 
from  the  savage  to  the  civilised  man.'^'' 

But  the  supreme  excitement  was  caused  by 
the  appearance  in  London  of  Omai  or  Omiah,  a 
South  Sea  Island  savage,  who  liad  been  brought 
home  by  Captain  Furneaux  after  Cook's  second 
voyage  to  the  Pacific.  Omai  was  gentle,  court- 
eous, likable — almost,  as  we  shall  see  later, 
'genteel,' — and  there  was  a  widespread  desire  to 
regard  his  as  the  true  state  of  natui'e.  The 
British  reception  in  the  South  Seas  had  been, 
on  the  whole,  remarkably  cordial.  The  Tongan 
Islands,  for  example,  had  been  named  by  Cap- 
tain Cook  the  Friendly  Islands.  Whether  they 
stood  more  in  need  of  the  blessings  of  civilisation 
or  civilisation  more  in  need  of  the  lessons  of  the 
South  Seas  was  a  question  which  could  now  be 

I*  Ail  Account  of  a  Savage  Girl,  Edinburgh,  1T68,  p.  xviii. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  9 

seriously  debated.  Horace  Walpole,  who  sneered 
at  everything,  despised  the  'forty  dozen  of  is- 
lands,' picked  up  the  Lord  knows  where,  which  so 
far  as  he  could  see,  had  nothing  of  more  in- 
trinsic interest  about  them  than  'new  sorts  of 
fleas  and  crickets,'  or  hogs  and  red  feathers. 
However,  he  opined  that,  if  properly  husbanded, 
they  might  produce  forty  more  wars.^  But  his 
was  a  lonely  voice  from  the  seat  of  the  scornful. 
The  British  imagination  decked  the  new  islands 
in  the  glowing  colours  of  romance.  Here  was  a 
land  of  perpetual  summer,  where  man  was  nour- 
ished without  toil  by  the  indulgence  of  Nature. 
Bread  grew  on  trees  and  a  natural  milk  flowed 
from  the  cocoanut.  Under  the  palm-tree  lay  the 
child  of  the  South  Seas,  'as  free  as  Nature  first 
made  man,'  who  ever  and  anon  burst  into 
snatches  of  song  as  he  paid  his  passionate  court 
to  the  dusky  mistress  at  his  side.  Ah,  here  was 
Paradise  enow! 

Does  the  account  seem  extravagant?     Listen 

^Letters,  August  23,  1772;  December  2,  1784.  The  conception 
of  Tahitan  as  superior  to  European  civilisation  is  as  old  as  the 
discovery  of  the  island,  and  the  vitality  of  the  notion  is  shown 
by  the  ever-increasing  literature  of  the  South  Seas.  Of  the  in- 
fluence of  Tahiti  on  the  character  of  Torquil  and  his  companions, 
Byron  says  in  The  Island  (2.368)  that  it 

Tamed    each    rude    wanderer    to    the    sympathies 
Of  those  who  were  more  happy  if  less  wise, 
Did  more  than  Europe's  discipline  had  done, 
And  civilised  Civilisation's  son. 


10  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

to  the  voice  of  the  poet  who  in  1774  put  forth 
anonymously,  a  poem  entitled  Otaheite: 

But  Fancy  leads  us  o'er  yon  Isle  to  rove, 
~~~^The  Cyprus  of  the  South,  the  Land  of  Love. 
Here  ceaseless  the  returning  seasons  wear 
Spring's  verdant  robes  and  smile  through- 
out the  year. 
Refreshing  zephyrs  cool  the  noontide  ray, 
And  plantane  groves  impervious  shades  dis- 
play. 
The  gen'rous  soil  exacts  no  tiller's  aid 
To  turn  the  Glebe  and  watch  the  infant  blade. 
Nature  their  vegetable  bread  supplies, 
And  high  in  air  luxurious  harvests  rise. 
No  annual  toil  the  foodful  plants  demand. 
But  unrenewed  to  rising  ages  stand; 
From  sire  to  son  the  long  succession  trace. 
And  lavish  forth  their  gifts  from  race  to  race. 
Beneath  their  shades  the  gentle  tribes  repose ; 
Each  bending  branch  their  frugal  Feast 

bestows. 
For  them  the  Cocoa  yieldi  its  milky  flood^ 
To  slake  their  thirst,  and  feed  their  temp'rate 

blood. 
No  ruddy  nectar  their  pure  bev'rage  stains. 
Foams  in  their  bowl,  and  swells  their  kind- 
ling veins. 

Their  ev'ning  hours  successive  sports  pro- 
long. 
The  wanton  dance,  the  love-inspiring  song. 

3  Cf.  Byron,  The  Island,  2.256  fF. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  11 

Impetuous  wishes  no  concealment  know. 
As  the  heart  prompts  the  melting  members 

flow. 
Each  Oberea*  feels  the  lawless  flame 
Nor  checks  desires  she  does  not  blush  to 

name. 

No  boding  presage  haunts  them  through 
the  night, 
No  cares  revive  with  early  dawn  of  light. 
Each  happy  day  glides  thougK|ess  as  the  last, 
Unknown  the  future,  unrecalled  the  past. 
Should  momentary  clouds,  with  envious 

shade. 
Blot  the  gay  scene  and  bid  its  colours  fade, 
As  the  next  hour  a  gleam  of  joy  supplies. 
Swift  o'er  their  minds  the  passing  sunshine 

flies. 
No  more  the  tear  of  transient  sorrow  flows. 
Ceased  are  the  lover's  pangs,  the  orphan's 

woes.^ 

All  this  is  not  merely  a  poet's  dream.  Many 
took  such  statements  literally.  Lord  Monboddo, 
in  a  serious  scientific  work,  asserted  in  so  many 
words,  that  the  Golden  Age  yet  lingered  in  the 
islands  of  the  South  Seas,^  'where  the  inhabitants      ( » 

4  Oberea  was  queen  of  Otaheitc. 

5  From  Olaheife,  London,  1774,  an  anonymous  poem.     My  friend,       ' 
Professor  Collins  of  Prince! on  calls  my  attention  to  the  fact  that 

a  selection   from  this  poem  appeared  in  the  Pennsylcanm  Maga-      it 
zine  for  March,  1775. 

^Origin   and  Progress  of  Language,  Second  ed.,   1774';   l.Q^6n., 
390  w. 


12  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

live  without  toil  or  labour  upon  the  bounty  of 
Nature.'  In  Otaheite,  he  says,  'the  inhabitants 
pull  bread  off  trees,  which  grow  with  no  culture, 
for  about  nine  months  of  the  year,  and  when  this 
food  fails,  it  is  supplied  by  nuts  and  other  wild 
fruits.' 

Boswell,  who  knew  Captain  Cook,  expressed  a 
wish  to  go  and  live  for  three  years  in  Otaheite,  in 
order  to  meet  with  people  so  different  from  any 
that  had  yet  been  known,  'and  be  satisfied  what 
nature  can  do  for  man.'  ^ 

We  have  reached  this  point  without  mention 
of  Rousseau.  It  would,  perhaps,  be  possible  to 
avoid  it  altogether,  for,  in  truth,  Rousseau  was 
not  at  this  time  widely  read  or  generally  popular 
in  England.  Important  as  was  his  later  influ- 
ence, it  was  slight  in  comparison  with  the  im- 
press made  upon  the  national  mind  by  Captain 
Cook  in  the  decade  of  the  'seventies.  Neverthe- 
less, Great  Britain  had  her  student  and  critic 
of  Rousseau.  James  Burnet,  more  generally 
known  by  his  judicial  title.  Lord  Monboddo,  may 
be  called  the  Scottish  Rousseau,^  for  he  held  the 

7  Life  of  Johnson,  ed.  Hill,  vol.  3,  p.  59. 

8  Among  other  references  to  Rousseau,  see  his  Origin  of  Lan- 
guage 2d  ed.  1.403  and  41*4  n,  and  Antient  Metaphy sicks,  3.333. 
Chapter  XII  in  the  first  volume  of  the  former  work  is  avowedly 
an  attempt  to  solve  'Mons.  Rousseau's  great  difficulty  with  respect 
to  the  invention  of  language.'     In  the  preface  to  the  History  of 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  13 

savage  mode  of  existence  superior  to  civilised  life. 
It  was  he  who  first  applied  to  the  study  of  the 
'&tate  of  nature'  the  historical  or  evolutionary 
method  as  opposed  to  the  older  philosophic  or 
'systematic'  m.ethod.    Monboddo's  chief  claim  to  j 
remembrance — a  recognition  which  science  has  I 
not  even  grudgingly  accorded  him — is  his  doc-  < 
trine  of  a  gradual  progression  of  living  things  \ 
from  a  rudimentary  to  a  more  developed  state,  y 
In  his  study  of  this  progression  he  anticipated 
some   important   conclusions   of  the   nineteenth 
centurj^ :    *In  all  natural  things/  he  wrote,  'there 
is  a  progress  from  an  imperfect  state  to  that 
state  of  perfection  for  which,  by  nature,  the  thing 
is  intended.     This  is  so  evident  to  me  that,  from 
theory  only,  though  it  could  not  be  proved  by 
facts,  I  should  believe  that  man  was  a  mere  ani- 
mal before  he  was  an  intelligent  being,  and  that 
there  was  a  progression  in  the  species  such  as  we 
are  sure  there  is  in  the  individual.'^ 

The  man  who  wrote  those  words  might,   I 
should  suppose,  fairly  be  reckoned  among  the 

the  Wild  Girl  Monboddo  says  that  Rousseau  is  the  'only  philoso-  " 
pher  of  our  time'  who  has  conceived  the  magnum  opus  of  philoso- 
phy to  be  *to  inquire  whether,  by  the  improvement  of  our  facul- 
ties, we  have  mended  our  condition  and  become  happier  as  well 
as  wiser.'  But,  he  adds,  though  Rousseau  had  the  idea,  none  has 
executed  it. 

^  Antient  Metaphysics,  vol.  3,  p.  282. 


14  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

c forerunners  of  Herbert  Spencer;  but  when  he  is 
•  j'eferred  to  at  all,  Monboddo  is  called  a  predeces- 
'Cf  sor  of  Darwin.  This  is  because  he  contended  that 
the  orang-outang  was  man  in  his  primitive  state. 
This  in  itself  was  sufficient  to  draw  upon  him  the 
ridicule  of  his  contemporaries;  for  though  they 
were  eager  to  assert  the  essential  nobility  of  the 
savage,  they  had  no  disposition  to  extend  their 
admiration  to  the  animal  kingdom  and  dwell  on 
the  simple  dignity  of  orang-outangs.  Yet  Mon- 
boddo, it  would  seem,  might  have  expected  to 
receive  recognition  from  a  later  generation  to 
Whose  habit  of  thought  his  own  was  more  natur- 
ally related.  Two  of  his  contemporaries,  it  is 
true,  interested  themselves  in  his  theories  if  the}" 
did  not  actually  accept  them — Robertson  the  his- 
torian and  Sir  Joseph  Banks  the  botanist,  who 
sailed  in  Cook's  first  expedition,  and  had  seen 
man  in  his  natvn*al  state. 

But  Monboddo  had  certain  faults  wliich  ex- 
posed him  to  the  derision  of  his  readers,  and,  in- 
deed, impaired  the  entire  value  of  his  books.  He 
'  had,  for  one  thing,  the  credulity  of  a  child,  with 
T'espect  to  anything  which  he  wished  to  believe. 
Since  he  had  no  real  acquaintance  with  primitive 
man,  save  what  visits  to  Peter  the  Wild  Boy  and 
IMlle.  Le  Blanc  had  given  him,  this  was  a  ruinous 
defect.    Much  of  the  evidence  which  he  seriouslv 


THE  STATE  OF  NATITRE  15 

presents  for  the  stud}^  of  historians  and  scientists 
would  have  disgraced  a  book  written  two  hundred 
years  before,  and  some  of  the  more  amusing 
anecdotes  would  adorn  the  lighter  pages  of  Griil- 
livers  Travels.  Monboddo  must  have  been  de- 
liberately gulled  by  practical  jokers,  returned 
travellers,  and  3^am-spinning  sailors.  He  be- 
lieved nearly  everything  he  was  told  and  all  that 
he  found  in  print.  He  quoted  from  Cardinal 
Polignac  the  account  of  an  animal  in  the  Ukraine 
called  the  hauhacis,  which  inhabits  caverns  under- 
ground, makes  wars,  takes  other  animals  into 
slavery,  and  lays  up  provisions  for  itself : 

They  make  those  slaves  lie  down  upon  their 
back,  and  hold  up  their  legs,  and  then  they  pack 
the  hay  upon  them,  which  their  legs  keep  to- 
gether, and  having  thus  loaded  these  living  carts, 
as  our  author  calls  them,  they  drag  them  along 
by  the  tail.  I  think  it  can  hardly  be  doubted  that 
this  animal,  with  so  much  sagacity,  if  it  had  like- 
wise the  organs  of  speech  would  in  process  of 
time,  invent  a  language.^^ 

But  the  most  famous  of  his  heresies  was  his  be- 
lief in  the  existence  of  men  with  tails.    His  other 
lapses  from  common  sense  might  have  been  for-      "^ 
gotten  in  time,  but  his  perpetual  emphasis  on  the 
caudal  appendage  put  all  his  readers  in  hysterics :    — . 

10  Origin  of  Lanf/uage,  1.423. 


16  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

I  could  produce  legal  evidence  by  witnesses 
yet  living  of  a  man  in  Inverness,  one  Barber,  a 
teacher  of  mathematics,  who  had  a  tail  about  half 
a  foot  long  which  he  carefully  concealed  during 
his  life ;  but  was  discovered  after  his  death,  which 
happened  about  twenty  years  ago." 

In  Monboddo's  theory  the  existence  of  a  tail 
was  all-important  because  it  would  demonstrate 
man's  relation  to  the  speechless  brute/^  To  Mon- 
boddo,  you  see,  it  was  the  missing  hnk.  Hence 
his  eagerness  to  discover  a  man,  or,  better  still, 
a  tribe  of  men  with  this  useful  member.  It  is  re- 
lated that  when  James  Bruce,  the  explorer,  re- 
turned to  Scotland  from  Abyssinia,  he  went  into 
a  court-room  where  Lord  Monboddo  was  sitting 
as  judge,  and  that  he  at  once  received  a  note 
from  the  noble  Lord  requesting  to  be  immediate- 
ly informed  if  he  had  encountered  any  men  with 
tails.  Such  men,  he  believed,^^  existed  in  the 
Dutch  East  Indies,  where  they  waved  their  tails 
like   cats — to   the   edification   of   an   occasional 

11  Origin  of  Language,  1.262  n. 

12  'I  have  dwelt  thus  long  upon  the  orang-outang  because  if  I 
make  him  out  to  be  a  man,  I  prove  by  fact  as  well  as  by  argu- 
ment, this  fundamental  proposition,  upon  which  my  whole  theory 
hangs,  that  language  is  not  natural  to  man.  And,  secondly,  I 
likewise  prove  that  a  natural  state  of  man,  such  as  I  suppose  it, 
is  not  a  mere  hypothesis,  but  a  state  which  at  present  actually 
exists.'     (Origin  of  Language,  vol.  1,  p.  358.) 

13  Origin  of  Language,  vol.  1,  p.  258. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  17 

sailor.  What  might  not  Burnet  have  found  in 
Abyssinia?  Contemporaries  of  Monboddo  made 
merry  over  this  tender  pre-occupation  of  his.  An 
anonymous  satirist  wrote  at  some  length  about 
the  spiritual  dangers  which  might  arise  from  too 
vain  a  regard  for  tails — if  we  had  them: 

This  rigid  Nature,  to  restrain  our  pride, 
To  monkies  granted,  but  to  men  denyed.^* 

Dr.  Johnson,  who  had  met  the  judge  in  Scot- 
land as  well  as  in  London,  said  of  him:  'Other 
people  have  strange  notions,  but  they  conceal 
them.  If  they  have  tails,  they  hide  them;  but 
Monboddo  is  as  jealous  of  his  tail  as  a  squirrel.' 
There  is  a  famous  passage  in  the  Descent  of 
Man  where  Darwin  describes  one  of  our  pre- 
sumptive simian  ancestors  with  an  eloquence  of 
admiration  which  scientists  usually  deny  them- 
selves. A  somewhat  similar  enthusiasm  was 
Monboddo's.  The  satirist  quoted  above  calls  him 
the  baboon's  'gen'rous  friend,'  who  'when  brutes 
can  rise  no  more,  makes  us  descend.'  Monboddo 
convinced  himself  that  orang-outangs  live  to- 
gether in  society,  and  frequently  act  in  concert, 
particularly  in  attacking  elephants,  that  they 
build  huts  to  defend  themselves  against  the 
weather,  and  'no  doubt  practise  other  arts,  both 

14.  From   An   Heroick    Epistle   from    Omiah    to    the    Queen   of 
Otaheite,  London,  1775.    Embryology  might  have  aided  Monboddo. 


n 


18  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

for  sustenance  and  defence.'  The  animal,  he 
o  said,  is  'of  human  form  both  outside  and  inside,' 
^  walks  upright,  makes  slaves  of  men  whom  he 
captures,  and  (b}^  way  of  climax)  plays  the 
0 — flute/^  In  disposition  he  is  docile  and  even  af- 
fectionate, naturally  attached  to  his  master  and 
to  his  mate.  He  is  even  capable  of  remorse  and 
of  sensitiveness.  Once  an  orang-outang  served  as 
a  sailor  on  board  a  Jamaican  ship  trading  to  the 
Slave  Coast.  He  messed  with  the  crew,  and  per- 
formed the  duties  of  a  sailor.  He  also  served 
the  captain  as  cabin-boy.  One  day  he  had  the 
misfortune  to  break  a  china  bowl,  and  'the  cap- 
tain,' says  our  author,  'beat  him,  which  the  ani- 
mal took  so  much  to  heart  that  he  abstained  from 
food,  and  died.'  In  short,  the  orang-outang  can 
do  everything  but  talk,  but  even  this  limitation 
of  his  abilities  was  not,  in  Monboddo's  eyes,  suffi- 
cient ground  for  excluding  him  from  the  genus 
homo.    Who  can  prove  that  language  is  natui-al 

15  See,  Origin  of  Language,  vol,  1,  p.  268,  and  Antient  Mefa- 
2)hysicks,  vol.  3,  pp.  41  ff.  Monboddo  refused  human  dignity  to 
the  monkey  and  even  the  ape:  'Though  I  hold  the  orang-outang 
to  be  of  our  specie?,  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  I  think  the 
monkey  or  ape,  with  or  without  a  tail,  participates  of  our  nature.' 
(Origin  of  Language,  vol.  1,  p.  311.) 

Goldsmith  attacks  Monboddo's  theory  in  his  History  of  Ani- 
mated Nature  (1774),  vol.  4,  p.  204,  where  he  says  of  the  orang- 
outang: *A11  its  boasted  wisdom  was  merely  of  our  own  making.' 
He  provides  an  engraving  of  the  animal,  which  shows  him  stick 
in  hand,  with  two  of  his  sheds  or  huts  in  the  middle  distance. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  19 

to  man^  JNIonboddo  believed  that  it  was  not, 
and  wrote  a  treatise  on  language  in  tlu^ee  vol- 
umes to  defend  and  establish  his  view. 

Monboddo  wrangled  with  Jolinson  about  the 
comparative  felicity  of  a  savage  and  a  London 
shop-keeper,  and  espoused  the  cause  of  the  for- 
mer. Although  my  acquaintance  in  both  groups 
is,  unhappily,  restricted,  I  should,  if  pressed  to 
a  decision,  choose  as  did  Monboddo.^''  The 
learned  judge,  you  see,  preferred  the  estate  which 
had  the  longer  and  richer  future  before  it.  The 
London  shop-keeper,  considered  as  typical  of 
modern  civilisation,  was,  he  held,  facing  extinc- 
tion. The  impoverished  life,  physical  and  men- 
tal, which  he  endured  in  the  metropohs,  was 
but  an  index  of  the  inevitable  disaster  which 
was  to  befall  him  and  the  social  world  that  had 
made  him.  For  JNIonboddo,  unlike  some  later 
evolutionists,  dipped  into  the  future,  where  he 
discovered  no  happj"  lot  for  mankind.  Civilisa- 
tion has  arrived  at  the  abyss.  Modern  man- 
such  as  the  shop-keeper — is  a  paltry  creature 
who,  in  the  general  decay,  physical  and  spiritual, 
has  already  reached  a  stage  below  that  of  the 
orang-outang.  The  popularity  of  such  figures  as 
Mowgli  and  Tarzan  shows  that  there  is  a  large 

16  Johnson   confessed  to   Mrs.   Thrale  that   at   another   time   he  ^ 
might  verj^  probably  have  argued  for  the  savage. 


t 


20  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

section  of  the  community — in  which,  no  doubt, 
are  several  representatives  of  the  shop-keeping 
class — who,  in  sentiment  and  imagination  at 
least,  are  not  unwilling  to  revert  to  a  savage 
state.  Monboddo  contended  that  the  savage's 
perfect  knowledge  of  certain  facts,  such  as  con- 
cern hunting  and  warfare,  more  than  repays  him 
for  his  ignorance  of  general  principles."  His 
senses  are  more  acute;  he  has  a  variety  of  exact 
information  derived  from  instinct,  which  gives 
him  a  foreknowledge  of  everything  necessary  to 
his  well-being.  He  is  incredibly  stronger  than 
civilised  man,  and  can  endure  more  pain  and  fa- 
tigue. He  brings  to  all  his  enterprises  a  patience 
and  perseverance  of  which  modern  man  is  in- 
capable. 

As  for  civilisation,  the  long  story  is  nearing  an 
end.  The  decline  is  now  so  rapid  as  to  be  al- 
most visible,  and  its  stages  may  be  traced  from 
age  to  age.  Warfare  alone  is  enough  to  make 
away  with  us:  'The  destruction  of  modem  war 
is  so  prodigious  by  the  great  armies  brought  into 
the  field  and  which  are  likewise  kept  up  in  time 
of  peace,  and  by  the  extraordinary  waste  of 
men,  by  fatigue,  disease  and  unwholesome  pro- 
visions, more  than  by  the  sword,  while  the  in- 
ternal policy  of  Europe  at  present  is  so  little 

17  Antient  Metaphysicks,  vol.  2,  pp.  157,  313. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  21 

fitted  to  supply  such  destruction  that,  unless  the 
princes  either  fall  upon  some  other  way  of  de- 
ciding their  quarrels  or  provide  better  for  the 
multiplication  of  people,  Europe  is  in  the  ut- 
most hazard  of  being  again  depopulated,  as  it 
once  was  mider  the  Romans,  but  without  the  re- 
source which  it  then  had  of  barbarous  nations  to 
repeople  it/^*  Other  causes  of  decline  analysed 
by  Monboddo^^  were  commerce  (Goldsmith's 
hete  noir)  and  depopulation  or  emigration  (Bos-  j 
well's)  and  their  result  is  exhibited  in  the  decreas-  ^ 
ing  stature  of  man,  feebler  health,  and  shorter  \ 
life.^^  In  the  rapid  development  of  science  and 
the  mechanic  arts  Monboddo  took  no  comfort, 
since  he  regarded  the  natural  philosophy  of  his 
day  as  conversant  merely  with  facts  and  as  sel- 
dom rising  above  'the  air-pump  and  the  alembic'. 
The  science  of  universals  as  developed  by  the 
Greeks  was  the  only  true  source  of  scientific  prin- 

18  Origin  of  Language,  vol.  1,  p.  430. 

19  Monboddo's  incomplete  MSS.  contain  an  outline  for  an  essay 
on  the  Degeneracy  of  Man  in  a  State  of  Society.    See  W.  Knight,    - 
Lord  Monboddo  and  his  Contemporaries,  p.  276. 

20  This  general  attitude  is  also  attacked  by  Goldsmith  in  his 
History  of  Animated  Nature.  'Man,'  he  says,  *was  scarce  formed 
when  he  began  to  deplore  an  imaginary  decay.'  He  concludes,  on 
the  evidence  of  antiquities  and  the  fine  arts,  that  men  have  been 
in  all  ages  *much  of  the  same  size  that  they  are  at  present.'  He 
admits,  however,  that  our  ancestors  excel  us  in  the  poetic  art, 
*as  they  had  the  first  rising  of  all  the  striking  images  of  Na- 
ture.'    To  this  belief  I  return  in  my  third  essay. 


%%  NATTTKF/S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

ciples,  and  its  neglect  by  the  new  experimental 
school  condemned  them  to  minister  to  the  merely 
physical  needs  of  man  and  thus  to  that  softening 
of  fibre  which  was  at  once  the  cause  and  the  symp- 
tom of  decay. 

There  is  a  gusto,  a  passionateindignation,  a 
satiric  force  in  some  of  Monboddo's  denunciations 
of  the  race  which  point  us  forward  to  the  style  of 
a  later  Scot  who  was  also  enamoured  of  invec- 
tive : 

If  Momus,  quitting  his  sportive  vein,  should 
assume  a  tone  of  keen  satire  and  virulent  invec- 
tive, and  if  M.  Rousseau  should  lend  him  words, 
he  would  say  that  man  is  the  most  mischievous 
animal  that  God  has  made,  that  he  has  already 
almost  depopulated  the  earth,  having  in  many 
countries  destroyed  whole  specieses  \sic\  of  ani- 
mals, and  continuing  daily  to  destroy  those  that 
remain,  not  only  to  gratify  his  luxury  and  vanity, 
but  for  mere  sport  and  pastime.  'What  attone- 
ment  \s%c\  most  pernicious  hiped  or  quadruped 
or  whatever  other  title  most  offends  thine  ear, 
what  attonement  canst  thou  make  for  this  so 
great  abuse  of  thy  superior  faculties  and  this  de- 
struction of  the  creatures  of  God?  None  other 
except  to  destroy  thyself  next,  and  so  avenge  the 
l^est  of  the  animal  race.  This  thou  art  doing  as 
fast  as  possible,  and  for  this  only  I  commend 
thee.  When  this  work  is  accomplished,  then  shall 
the  true  state  of  nature  be  restored,  and  the  real 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  23 

golden  age  return.  Then  shall  Astraea  visit  the 
earth  again,  whose  latest  footsteps  are  now  no 
longer  to  be  seen.  So  shall  the  rest  of  the  ani- 
mal creation,  freed  from  a  tyrannical  and  capri- 
cious master,  live  the  life  which  nature  has  des- 
tined for  them  and  accomplish  the  end  of  their 
being.  So  shall  even  man  himself,  if  any  of  the 
wretched  race  yet  remain,  acquit  providence  of 
the  imputations  he  has  thrown  upon  it,  and  shew 
that  he  was  made  upright,  though  he  have  found 
out  many  inventions/^^ 

In  all  the  annals  of  modern  nihilism  it  would 
be  difficult  to  cite  a  destructive  mania  more  ex- 
travagant than  this;  it  is,  indeed,  the  climax  of 
tile  author's  pessimism.  Yet  in  the  man  him- 
self there  was  nothing  of  the  Ishmaelite.  He  was 
given  to  self-discipline.  In  an  age  of  overeating 
his  meals  were  light  and  frugal.  He  had  a  most 
undemocratic  love  of  baths,  which  he  took  cold, 
at  the  unheard-of  hour  of  six  in  the  morning,  and 
at  a  'bower'  near  a  running  stream.  He  sat 
naked  in  the  open  air  in  order  to  harden  himself, 
and  to  protest  against  the  luxury  which  was  lull- 
ing the  age  into  effeminacy  and  decay.  He 
eschewed  all  modern  'conveniences.'  Even  when 
going  to  London  he  would  not  make  use  of  a 
coach  or  chaise,  but  rode  all  the  way  on  horse- 
back.^^   His  estates  at  Monboddo  fell  into  decay, 

21  Oriffin  of  Lnnr/uage,  yo].   1,  page  414  n, 

22  In  this  respect  he  was  but  practising  the  precepts  of  Rous- 


24  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

but,  as  they  had  been  good  enough  for  his  an- 
cestors, who  were  better  men  than  he,  he  left 
them  unrepaired.  He  might  be  condemned  by 
fortune  to  live  in  an  era  of  decay,  but  he  could  at 
least  rise  superior  to  the  self-indulgence  all  about 
him. 

In  commenting  on  Lord  Monboddo's  system, 
Boswell  remarked  that  if  savage  life  were  truly 
desirable,  the  felicity  might  be  enjoyed  by  many, 
since  a  man  might  betake  himself  to  the  woods 
whenever  he  pleased.^^  Boswell  had  visited 
Rousseau  in  his  'wild  retreat'  in  the  Val  de 
Travers,  where,  however,  he  seems  to  have  found 
a  measure  of  savage  simplicity  still  lacking.  He 
spoke  to  Johnson  of  a  man  of  whom  Lord  Mon- 
boddo  knew,  who  had  lived  for  some  time  in  the 
wilds  of  America,  and  who  was  wont  to  reflect: 
*Here  am  I,  free  and  unrestrained,  amidst  the 
rude  magnificence  of  nature,  with  this  Indian 
woman  by  my  side  and  this  gun  with  which  I 
can  procure  food  when  I  want  it.  What  more 
can  be  desired  for  human  happiness'?  Johnson 
retorted:  *It  is  sad  stuff.  It  is  brutish.  If  a 
bull  could  speak,  he  might  as  well  exclaim,  "Here 

seau.  The  latter  philosopher  proposed  to  have  no  carriages  what- 
ever in  Corsica.  Ladies  and  priests  might  ride  in  two-wheeled 
chaises;  but  'les  laiques,  de  quelques  rangs  qu'ils  soient,  ne  pour- 
ront  voyager  qu'a  pied  ou  a  cheval.'  Streckeisen-Moultou,  Oeuvres 
in^dites  de  Rousseau,  p.  119. 

23  In  his  Hypochondriack,  No.  51,  London  Magazine. 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  26 

am  I  with  this  cow  and  this  grass;  what  being 
can  enjoy  greater  fehcity"  '? 

The  difference  between  civilised  and  savage 
life  may  be  measured  either  by  sojourn  among 
barbaric  peoples  or  by  bringing  savages  into  the 
heart  of  modern  civilisation.  In  the  representa- 
tives of  a  ruder  life  brought  suddenly  into  the 
midst  of  metropolitan  life,  the  world  of  1770  dis- 
played an  absorbing  and  a  somewhat  naive  in- 
terest. In  the  autumn  of  1772,  Captain  Cart- 
wright,  the  Labrador  explorer,  brought  a  family 
of  five  Esquimaux  on  a  visit  to  London.  The 
head  of  this  family  was  Attuiock,  who,  in  his  own 
country,  held  the  rank  of  priest;  he  was  accom- 
panied by  his  youngest  wife  and  her  little  daugh- 
ter not  yet  four  years  old,  his  younger  brother 
and  the  latter's  wife,  named  Caubvick.  These 
people,  arrayed  in  skins  and  accompanied  by  an 
Esquimau  dog  and  a  'beautiful  eagle,'  caused  a 
convulsion  of  excitement  in  the  streets  of  Lon- 
don. Captain  Cartwright  was  so  overrun  with 
visitors  at  his  lodgings  in  Leicester  Street  that 
he  was  obliged  to  change  his  residence,  and  to  de- 
vote two  days  a  week  to  exhibiting  the  Esqui- 
maux. On  these  days  the  crowd  at  his  door  was 
so  great  as  to  fill  up  the  street  in  which  the  house 
was  situated.  Among  the  visitors  was  James 
Boswell  who  went  and  tried  to  converse  with 


26  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Attuiock  by  signs;  this  he  did  by  way  of  testing 
Monboddo's  theory  that  it  was  possible  to  carry 
on  a  considerable  conversation  without  spoken 
words. 

The  Esquimaux  saw  King  George  review  some 
of  his  troops.  The  king  glanced  at  the  strangers, 
took  off  his  hat,  and  smiled.  Later  they  were 
presented  at  Court,  as  well  as  to  'several  of  the 
nobility  and  people  of  fashion.'  They  were  taken 
to  the  opera  and  to  the  play.  Colman  gave  a 
special  performance  of  Cymheline  for  them,  at 
which  they  occupied  tlie  royal  box.  But  they 
lacked  the  power  of  response  to  all  these  oppor- 
tunities. Once,-  after  a  walk  from  Westminster 
Bridge  to  Hyde  Park,  Attuiock  cried  out,  'Oh, 
I  am  tired:  here  are  too  many  houses,  too  much 
smoke,  too  many  people.  Labrador  is  very  good. 
Seals  are  plentiful  there.  I  wish  I  was  back 
again.' 

i  As  the  days  passed,  there  was  some  slight  ad- 
vance in  their  appreciation  of  the  things  about 
them,  but,  Cartwright  says,  no  intelligent  un- 
derstanding of  their  origin  or  use,  an}^  more  than 
'one  of  the  brute  creation'  might  have.  Struct- 
ures like  London  Bridge  and  St.  Paul's  Cathe- 
dral they  took  for  natural  objects  of  gigantic 
size  sucli  as  their  own  ice-cliffs,  and  even  after 
examination,  could  hardly  believe  them  to  be  the 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  27 

work  of  human  hands.  In  the  country — Cart- 
wright  removed  them  to  Nottinghamshire  in 
February — they  were  happier,  for  there  the  men 
took  naturally  to  fox-hunting  and  the  women  to 
dancing.  *The  land  is  all  made'  was  their  com- 
ment on  the  English  scene. ^* 

When  Cartwright  embarked  again  for  Labra- 
dor in  May,  1773,  the  Esquimaux  were  all  well- 
pleased  at  the  prospect  of  going  home.  But  the 
poor  creatures  had  not  yet  finished  with  civilisa- 
tion. On  the  return  voyage  they  fell  ill,  appar- 
ently with  small-pox,  and  all  died  except  Cau- 
bvick,  who,  bald  and  emaciated,  was  restored  to 
her  wailing  countrywomen.  She,  more  than  any 
other  in  the  little  group,  had  seemed  to  appre- 
ciate the  comfort  and  luxury  to  which  she  had 
been  introduced;  she  is  said  to  have  become  a 
graceful  dancer.  But  she  resimied  her  native 
mode  of  living  with  a  complacency  which  oc- 
casioned Cartwright,  when  he  saw  her  again, 
great  surprise. 

Omai,  the  South  Sea  Islander,  who  was 
brought  to  London  in  the  autumn  of  the  next 
year,  was  received  with  no  less  enthusiasm  than 
the  Esquimaux  had  been.     He,  too,  was  pre- 

24  The  best  account  of  the  Esquimaux  in  London  is  found  in 
C.  W.  Townsend's  Captain  Cartwright  and  his  Labrador  Journal, 
Boston,  1911.    See  the  entry  for  October  23,  1772,  et  seq. 


28  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

sented  at  court;  the  artists  of  the  day  vied  with 
one  another  in  reproducing  his  features,  he  be- 
came the  favourite  of  Lady  Sandwich;  and  all 
that  the  gay  and  fashionable  world  could  do  to 
pleasure  a  visitor  was  done  for  Omai.  He  was  a 
much  more  agreeable  person  than  Attuiock,  and 
showed  an  appreciation  of  civilisation  that  was, 
superficially,  as  keen  as  Attuiock's  had  been  dull. 
But,  when  the  time  came  for  him  to  return  to  his 
home,  the  general  feeling  was  that  he  had  gained 
nothing  of  lasting  worth,  and  that  it  would  have 
been  better  for  him  if  he  had  been  left  in  his 
island.  The  mantle  of  civilisation  slipped  easily 
from  the  brown  shoulders  of  Omai;  but  he  was 
never  again  what  he  had  been  before.  The  touch 
of  the  western  world,  which  had  not  been  able  to 
transform  him  into  the  image  of  civiUsed  man, 
had  yet  spoiled  him  for  life  among  his  kind. 

Those  who  believed  English  civilisation  to  be 
corrupt  found  in  its  effect  upon  Omai  and  the 
Esquimaux  plentiful  evidence  of  their  conten- 
tion. Material  comforts  seemed  to  them  to  be 
shown  in  their  true  character  as  more  of  a  curse 
than  a  blessing.  But  those  who  took  a  saner 
view  saw  that  it  was  not  a  question  of  measuring 
civilisation  by  its  material  possessions,  but  rather 
of  testing  men  by  their  capacity  to  make  a  proper 
use  of  such  'blessings.'    In  the  last  analysis,  it  is 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  29 

this  capacity  which  distinguishes  an  Omai  from 
a  Pericles,  a  Caubvick  from  an  Aspasia.  I  know 
of  no  better  conclusion  regarding  the  matter  than 
that  given  by  Oliver  Goldsmith  in  a  passage  now 
almost  forgotten  in  the  History  of  the  Earth  and 
Animated  Nature. ^^  It  represents,  I  think,  his 
reasoned  conclusion  on  this  subject  of  ours,  and 
though  it  differs  radically  from  the  superficial 
views  which  he  expressed  in  the  conversation 
quoted  at  the  beginning  of  this  paper,  it  is  none 
the  less  characteristic  of  him — characteristic, 
moreover,  of  that  finer  thought  which  is  always 
found  in  his  books  as  distinct  from  his  conversa- 
tion: 

We  shall  never  know  whether  the  things  of 
this  world  have  been  made  for  our  use;  but  we 
very  well  know  that  we  have  been  made  to  enjoy 
them.  Let  us  then  boldly  affirm  that  the  earth 
and  all  its  wonders  are  ours;  since  we  are  fur- 
nished with  powers  to  force  them  into  our  ser- 
vice. Man  is  the  lord  of  all  the  sublunary  crea- 
tion; the  howling  savage,  the  winding  serpent, 
with  all  the  untamable  and  rebellious  offspring 
of  nature  are  destroyed  in  the  contest  or  driven 
at  a  distance  from  his  habitations.  The  exten- 
sive and  tempestuous  ocean,  instead  of  limiting 
or  dividing  his  power,  only  serves  to  assist  his 
industr}^  and  enlarge  the  sphere  of  his  enjoy- 
ments.    Its  billows  and  its  monsters,  instead  of 

25  Ed.  1774;  vol.  1,  chapter  15. 


30  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

presenting  a  scene  of  terror,  only  call  up  the 
courage  of  this  intrepid  little  being;  and  the 
greatest  dangers  that  man  now  fears  on  the  deep 
is  [^*c]  from  his  fellow-creatures.  Indeed,  when 
I  consider  the  human  race  as  Nature  has  formed 
them,  there  is  but  very  little  of  the  habitable 
globe  that  seems  made  for  them.  But  when  I 
consider  them  as  accumulating  the  experience  of 
ages,  in  commanding  the  earth,  there  is  nothing 
,  so  great  or  so  terrible.  What  a  poor,  contemp- 
tible being  is  the  naked  savage,  standing  on  the 
beach  of  the  ocean  and  trembling  at  its  tumults! 
How  little  capable  is  he  of  converting  its  terrors 
into  benefits  or  of  saying,  "Behold  an  element 
made  wholly  for  my  enjoyment!"  He  considers 
it  as  an  angry  deity,  and  pays  it  the  homage  of 
submission.  But  it  is  very  different  when  he  has 
exercised  his  mental  powers;  when  he  has  learned 
.  to  find  his  own  superiority  and  to  make  it  sub- 
S  servient  to  his  commands.  It  is  then  that  his  dig- 
'^  nity  begins  to  appear,  and  that  the  true  Deity  is 
justly  praised  for  having  been  mindful  of  man; 
for  having  given  him  the  earth  for  his  habitation 
and  the  sea  for  an  inheritance.^® 

26  Compare  the  opening  sentences  of  the  book:  'The  world  may 
be  considered  as  one  vast  mansion  where  man  has  been  admitted 
to  enjoy,  to  admire,  and  to  be  grateful.  The  first  desires  'of 
savage  nature  are  merely  to  gratify  the  importunities  of  sensual 
appetite  and  to  neglect  the  contemplation  of  things,  barely  satis- 
fied with  their  enjoyment:  the  beauties  of  nature  and  all  the 
wonders  of  creation  have  but  little  charms  for  a  being  taken  up 
in  obviating  the  wants  of  the  days,  and  anxious  for  precarious 
subsistence.* 


THE  STATE  OF  NATURE  31 

If  a  man  finds  civilisation  a  menace  to  the 
spirit,  he  would,  no  doubt,  do  well  to  renounce  it 
and  retire  into  a  monastery  or  even  to  a  lodge  in 
some  vast  wilderness.    Such  retirement  is  of  ob- 
vious value,  and  the  regular  life  is  a  genuine  need 
of  civihsation  in  every  age.    But  to  renounce  they 
things  of  civihsation  as  well  for  others  as  for  one-'^ 
self,  or,  worse  still,  for  the  community  at  large,  \ 
is  to  make  the  perilous  assertion  that  there  is  but 
one  way  to  grow  in  grace.     If  thine  eye  offend 
thee,  pluck  it  out,  but  do  so  with  a  rational  recol- 
lection that  an  eye  does  not,  naturally,  cause 
offence,  and  that  it  may  be  well  for  others  to  keep 
their  eyes. 

The  consideration  of  Nature's  simple  plan  was  ^ 
carried  over  into  the  Romantic  Movement,  and 
may  be  traced  in  some  of  its  loveliest  manifesta- 
tions in  the  work  of  Wordsworth  and  of  Byron, 
of  Longfellow  and  of  Thoreau ;  and  the  doctrine  * 
of  repudiation,  limitation,  and  prohibition,  has, 
as  we  are  all  aware,  remained  an  essential  feature 
of  it.  Yet  histoiy  has,  I  believe,  no  outstanding 
example  of  a  great  civilisation  based  upon  re- 
nunciations, except,  perhaps,  that  of  Sparta,  and 
the  civilisation  of  Sparta,  when  all  is  said,  was 
not  conspicuous  for  its  art. 


II 


A  NEW  NATION 

'How  end  all  our  victories?    In  debts  and  a 
wretched  jpeace' 

— Horace  Walpole. 

•     Since  man,  by  nature,  consorts  with  his  kind, 
Nature's  simple  plan  must  be  applicable  to  men 
in  society ;  there  must  be,  in  other  words,  a  *state 
,  of  nature'  for  peoples  as  well  as  for  individuals. 
Throughout  the  century  the  characteristic  marks 
of  such  a  society  were  the  subject  of  profound 
study  and  brilliant  speculation.    But  where  was 
the  model  to  be  found?     Some,  like  Rousseau, 
despaired  of  discovering  it  anywhere  in  the  mod- 
ern world,  could  not  be  certain  that  such  a  group 
,  had  ever  existed  in  the  past,  and  were  obliged  to 
'  admit  that  the  state  which  was  the  subject  of 
their  inquiries  might  be  merely  ideal.    Neverthe- 
less it  was  an  ideal  possible  of  attainment  and, 
indeed,  as  natural  and  of  as  much  authority  in 
governing  the  conduct  and  the  political  ventures 
of  men  as  though  its  existence  were  actual. 
(On  one  characteristic  of  such  a  society  of  men, 

32 


A  NEW  NATION  33 

all  were  agreed.  It  must  be  free.  Of  liberty  and 
the  natural  rights  of  man  the  philosophers  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  wrote  with 
an  eloquence  that  has  never  been  surpassed^  It 
is  not  my  intention  to  review  their  conclusions. 
For  the  purposes  of  this  paper  it  is  sufficient  to 
say  that  one  of  their  chief  problems  was  to  recon- 
cile the  existence  of  personal  freedom  with  that 
quantum  of  authority  which  is  necessary  in  order 
to  hold  any  state  together.  Concession  of  some 
kind  there  must  be,  an  equal  concession  from  all 
the  contracting  parties.  Equality  in  the  sight  of 
the  law  is  prerequisite  to  any  such  conception  of 
liberty.  Moreover,  any  notion  of  equality  con- 
tains within  itself  a  theory  of  brotherhood;  and 
thus  the  group  becomes  a  family,  self -governed, 
the  members  of  which  owe  allegiance  to  an  ab- 
straction, a  'state'  or  'commonwealth,'  whose  only 
'rights'  are  those  which  the  component  individ- 
uals have  surrendered  to  it. 

But  where  was  such  a  model  nation  to  be 
found? 

'There  is,'  wrote  Rousseau  in  his  Social  Con- 
tract, 'one  country  still  capable  of  legislation — 
the  island  of  Corsica.  The  courage  and  con- 
stancy with  wliich  that  brave  people  have  re- 
covered and  defended  their  liberty  deserves  the 
reward  of  having  some  wise  man  teach  them  how 


34  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

to  preserve  it.  I  have  a  presentiment  that  this 
little  island  will  one  day  astonish  Europe.'^ 
Rousseau  was  not  the  only  author  who  had  eulo- 
gised the  Corsicans.  King  Frederick  of  Prussia 
had  already  written  of  them  a  sentence  which 
Rousseau  may  have  known,  and  in  which  this  'ht- 
tle  handful  of  brave  men'  were  cited  to  prove 
how  much  courage  and  natural  virtue  the  love  of 
liberty  bestowed  upon  men.^ 

The  words  of  Rousseau  were  especially  grate- 
ful to  the  Corsicans,  insomuch  that  Buttafuoco,  a 
native  Corsican  resident  on  the  Continent,  wrote 
to  Rousseau  in  1761,  suggesting  to  him  that  he 
should  draw  up  a  plan  of  government  to  be  used 
when  Corsica  should  have  established  her  inde- 
pendence. Rousseau,  though  he  did  not  accept 
at  once,  soon  made  it  clear  that  he  would  un- 
dertake the  work.  It  is  difficult  to  see  how  he 
could  have  declined  the  offer,  once  made — the 
wonder  is  that  it  was  made  at  all — for  it  was  a 
unique  opportunity  to  translate  into  fact  the 
theory  of  government  stated  in  the  Social  Con- 
tract, But  unfortunately  Rousseau  knew  nothing 
of  Corsica;  he  had  never  been  to  the  island,  and 
had,  at  the  moment,  no  desire  to  go.  He  shrank 
from  the  exertion  of  such  a  trip,  and  complained 

1  Book  2,  chapter  10. 

2  Anti-Machiavel,  chapter  20. 


A  NEW  NATION  35 

of  the  amount  of  baggage  which  he  and  the  faith- 
ful Therese  would  have  to  carry — linen,  books, 
kitchen  utensils,  and  even  paper  on  which  to 
draft  the  constitution!  In  order  to  spare  him- 
self, therefore,  he  wrote  to  Buttafuoco  and  de- 
manded all  kinds  of  information,  a  map,  a  sketch 
of  the  topography,  flora,  and  fauna  of  the  island, 
its  history  and  culture,  and  an  account  of  the 
character  of  the  people.  On  the  basis  of  what  he 
learned  he  began  work  on  the  constitution,^ 
which,  however,  he  never  completed.  It  is  in 
many  ways  a  curiously  modern  document.  Its 
references  to  the  sot  orgueil  des  bourgeoiSj  its 
glorification  of  manual  labour,  and  its  repudia- 
tion of  money  (which  is  to  be  tolerated  only  till 
that  happy  day  when  it  will  be  worthless) ,  might 
have  been  written  yesterday.  Liberty,  says  the 
preface  or  Consideration  Generale,  such  as  it  is 
conceived  in  other  European  countries,  is  a 
travesty.  England,  for  example,  loves  Hberty 
not  for  itself  but  only  as  an  opportunity  for  mak- 
ing money.  But  what  is  true  liberty?  The  con- 
stitution of  Corsica  shall  answer.  On  assuming 
his  rank  as  a  Corsican,  every  citizen  shall  swear 
the  following  oath,  in  the  open  air,  with  his  hand 

s  See  M.  G.  Streckeisen-Moultou,  Oeuvres  in^dites  de  Rousseau, 
Paris,  1861. 


36  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

upon  a  copy  of  the  Gospels,*  and  in  the  presence 
of  his  equals: 

Je  m'unis  de  corps,  de  biens,  de  volonte  et  de 

toute  ma  puissance  a  la  nation  corse,  pour  lui  ap- 
partenir  en  toute  propriete,  moi  et  tout  ce  qui 
depend  de  moi.    Je  jure  de  vivre  et  mourir  pour 

elle,  d'observer  toutes  ses  lois  et  d'obeir  a  ses 
chefs  et  magistrats  legitimes  en  tout  ce  qui  sera 
conforme  aux  lois.  Ainsi  Dieu  me  soit  en  aide 
en  cette  vie,  et  fasse  misericorde  a  mon  ame. 
Vivent  a  jamais  la  liberte,  la  justice,  et  la  Repub- 
lique  des  Corses.  Amen.  Et  tous,  tenant  la 
main  droite  elevee,  repondront.  Amen. 

The  poverty  of  Corsica  was  one  of  its  attrac- 
tions to  Rousseau,  for  he  wished  to  attach  the 
people  to  the  soil.  The  sole  method  of  keeping 
a  state  independent,  he  asserted,  was  by  cultivat- 
ing its  soil.  He  hoped  that  the  population  of 
Corsica  might  so  increase  that  every  fertile  inch 
of  the  island  should  be  under  cultivation.  The 
object  was  to  turn  the  Corsicans  into  a  nation  of 
farmers,  and  very  literally  to  beat  swords  into 
plough-shares.  The  island  was  to  be  self-sup- 
porting and  independent  of  commerce  with  its 
neighbours.  'Le  seul  moyen,'  wrote  Rousseau, 
*de  maintenir  un  Etat  dans  Findependance  des 

4  The  one  restriction  laid  upon  Rousseau  in  his  work  was  that 
he  should  not  tamper  with  the  Corsican  religion.  So  Paoli  told 
Andrew  Burnaby.    See  the  latter's  Journal  of  a  Tour  to  Corsica. 


A  NEW  NATION  37 

autres  est  1' agriculture.'  For  this  reason  his  en- 
tire plan  is  a  'systeme  rustique.'  Trades  and  all 
forms  of  traffic  were  to  be  discouraged,  as  fit 
only  for  the  bourgeois  with  their  stupid  pride. 
Indeed  the  bourgeois  *only  disparage  and  dis- 
hearten the  laborer.'  They  congregate  naturally 
in  cities,  and  cities  in  the  systeme  rustique  are 
noxious.  People  are  either  producers  or  idlers. 
As  for  money  and  the  financial  system,  they  must 
for  a  time  be  tolerated;  but  presently,  if  the 
cultivation  of  the  land  is  successful,  money  will 
become  useless.  At  best  it  is  but  a  mark  and 
symbol  of  inequality,  and  the  less  it  circulates  in 
the  island,  the  more  will  abundance  reign. 

Inasmuch  as  there  will  be  no  great  fortunes  to 
be  made,  men  will  not  wish  either  to  desert  the 
farm  for  the  city,  or  to  increase  the  size  of  their 
holdings.  Severe  penalties  were  fixed  to  en- 
courage the  people  to  remain  at  home.  No  one 
was  to  be  allowed  to  hold  land  outside  his  own 
parish,  or  pieve;  and  any  one  who  moved  to  an- 
other district  was  to  be  penalized  by  the  loss  of 
his  citizenship.  The  duty  of  a  Corsican  was  to 
stay  at  home  and  propagate  his  kind.  With  the 
extirpation  of  luxury  would  come  health,  happi- 
ness, tranquillity  and  large  families. 

In  contrast  to  this  vision  of  peace  and  agri- 
culture, we  may  turn  to  another  account: 


88  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Corsica  is  a  vast  assemblage  of  mountains, 
crowned  with  primaeval  forests  and  furrowed 
with  deep  valleys.  At  the  bottom  of  these  val- 
leys is  a  little  productive  soil  [terre  vegetale^y 
with  a  few  scattered  groups  of  half  savage  peo- 
ple, subsisting  on  chestnuts.  These  people  have 
not  the  look  of  a  society  of  men,  but  rather  seem 
like  a  group  of  hermits,  drawn  together  only  by 
their  needs.  Thus,  though  poor,  they  are  not 
greedy.  They  think  of  only  two  things:  taking 
vengeance  on  their  enemy  and  courting  their  mis- 
tress. They  are  replete  with  a  sense  of  honor, 
and  it  must  be  admitted  that  it  is  a  more  sensible 
honom*  than  that  of  18th  century  Paris.  But  on 
the  other  hand,  their  vanity  is  almost  as  easily 
piqued  as  that  of  a  bourgeois  in  a  village.  If, 
while  on  a  certain  road,  one  of  their  enemies 
sounds  a  cowherd's  horn  from  the  top  of  the 
neighboring  mount,  it  is  no  time  for  hesitation. 
That  man  must  be  killed.^ 

It  was  estimated  that  eight  hundred  Corsicans 
were  lost  every  year  by  assassination  alone.  To 
Chesterfield,  who  reflected  the  view  of  the  diplo- 
mats of  Europe,  the  people  were  a  'parcel  of 
cruel  and  perfidious  rascals';  and  even  Boswell 
was  shocked  by  their  vendettas.  Yet  the  imagi- 
nation of  the  liberals  idealised  Corsica  as  a  land 
of  'iron  and  soldiers,'  and  saw  in  a  turbulent  and 
vindictive  generation  the  aspiring  children  of 
Liberty.    Mrs.  Barbauld  wrote  of  the  island, 

6  Stendhal,  Vie  de  NapoUon,  I. 


A  NEW  NATION  39 

Liberty, 
The  mountain  goddess,  loves  to  range  at  large 
Amid  such  scenes,  and  on  the  iron  soil 
Prints  her  majestic  step. 

To  such  the  Corsicans  were  the  modern  Lacede- 
monians, the  sons  of  Nature,  the  disciples  of 
asceticism.  The  poet  proclaims  that  they  are 
'true  to  their  high  descent,'  which  is  from  no  less 
a  stock  than  *  Sparta's  sad  remains.'  The  British, 
in  particular,  were  fond  of  comparing  Corsica  to 
their  own  island, 

By  nature  destined  the  retreat  of  peace 
And  smiling  Freedom;  like  Britannia,  girt 
With  guardian  waves ;  thy  vales  and  watered 

plains 
To  persevering  toil  and  culture  yield 
Abundance;  not  spontaneously  profuse 
To  pamper  sloth,  but  fertile  to  reward 
The  arts  of  industry.^ 

Rousseau,  however,  would  not  promise  fame 
to  the  Corsicans,  but  only  happiness;  he  under- 
stood very  well  that  his  system  was  one  of  re- 
nunciation : 

La  nation  ne  sera  point  illustre,  mais  elle  sera 
heureuse.  On  ne  parlera  pas  d'elle;  elle  aura 
peu  de  consideration  au  dehors;  mais  elle  aura 
I'abondance,  la  paix  et  la  liberte  dans  son  sein. 

6  From  Corsica,  a  Poetical  Address,  Glasgow,  1769.    Anonymous. 


410  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

In  this  land  of  peace  and  liberty  there  was  to 
be  the  most  careful  regulation  of  marriage.  A 
man  who  married  before  the  age  of  twenty,  or 
who  married  a  girl  less  than  fifteen,  or  a  widow 
whose  age  differed  from  his  own  by  more  than 
twenty  years,  was  to  lose  his  citizenship.  No 
bachelor  was  permitted  to  make  a  will  or  other- 
wise dispose  of  his  property.  All  was  confiscate 
to  the  state.  Any  bachelor  who  remained  unmar- 
ried until  the  age  of  forty  was  to  lose  his  rights 
of  citizenship  in  perpetuity.  On  the  other  hand, 
a  young  woman  who  mated  with  a  Corsican  was 
to  be  dowered  by  the  state,  but  only  with  land; 
of  this,  however,  there  was  to  be  enough  to  enable 
the  man,  by  industry,  to  rise  to  the  primary  rank 
of  citizenship.  If  a  man  had  more  than  five 
children,  the  state  was  to  assist  in  supporting  the 
sixth  child  and  all  subsequent  children;  but  only 
resident  offspring  might  be  counted,  and  those 
absent  from  the  island  for  more  than  a  year  might 
never  be  reckoned  as  belonging  to  the  family, 
whether  or  not  they  returned.  This  last  pro- 
vision was  aimed  at  the  evil  of  depopulation, 
which,  we  have  seen,  had  been  assigned  by  many 
as  one  of  the  great  causes  of  modern  degeneracy. 

Such  are  some  of  the  provisions  which  Rous- 
seau made  for  the  ideal  state.  The  system  was 
never  completed,  and  the  experiment  never  tried. 


A  NEW  NATION  41 

Corsica  was  at  the  moment  in  a  state  of  insur- 
rection against  her  sovereign  mistress,  the  repub- 
Hc  of  Genoa.  Corsica  had  been  in  such  a  state, 
time  out  of  mind.  But  her  affairs  were  now 
rapidly  approaching  a  climax,  and  it  seemed  as 
though  she  might  succeed  in  gaining  her  inde- 
pendence from  Genoa,  and  in  establishing  a  re- 
public which  the  powers  would  be  able  to  recog- 
nise. There  was  already  a  provisional  govern- 
ment, at  the  head  of  which  was  the  Generalissimo 
of  the  Corsican  armies,  Pasquale  Paoli,  perhaps 
the  greatest  man  that  the  island  had  yet  pro- 
duced. A  man  of  noble  ideals  and  gentle  man- 
ners, he  had  united  the  factions  of  the  island, 
guided  their  destinies  with  a  firm  hand,  and  en- 
abled his  people  to  make  head  against  their  ene- 
mies. By  all  representatives  of  liberal  thought 
in  Europe,  except  perhaps  by  Rousseau  himself, 
who  feared  that  in  the  new  order  of  things,  Paoli 
might  not  be  willing  to  sink  into  the  role  of 
citizen-farmer,  he  was  regarded  not  only  as  the 
founder  of  a  new  race — an  Aeneas,  a  Lycurgus, 
an  Epaminondas,  a  Solon,  the  father  and  legis- 
lator of  his  people — but  also  as  the  symbol  and 
the  morning  star  of  a  new  era.  Believers  in  the 
new  theories  of  the  rights  of  men,  visionaries,  and 
doctrinaires,  turned  eyes  of  hope  and  patient 
scrutiny  towards  Corsica  and  Paoli.    When  later 


42  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Paoli  crossed  the  Continent,  an  admirer  wrote: 
*In  Holland  the  Prince  Statholder  did  him  all 
the  honours  in  his  power;  and  the  Dutch  seemed, 
in  his  presence,  to  recover  their  ancient  spirit 
by  which  they  threw  off  the  Spanish  yoke.  He 
passed  through  the  Belgic  hemisphere  like  a 
planet  of  Liberty,  warming  every  soul  in  his 
progress.'^  The  name  of  a  town  in  Pennsylvania 
commemorates  the  interest  which  was  felt  in  the 
Corsican  patriot  by  the  colonists  of  America.  To 
Paoli,  after  the  ruin  of  the  Corsican  hopes,  Vit- 
torio  Alfieri  dedicated  Timoleone,  his  'tragedy 
of  liberty,'  as  to  one  who,  even  in  the  degenerate 
days  of  eighteenth  century  Italy,  would  be  able 
to  read  the  tragedy  aright. 

In  Corsica  itself  Paoli's  authority  was  at  a  far 
remove  from  the  simplicities  of  the  eighteenth 
century  system-makers.  Burnaby  found  Paoli's 
power  unlimited,  and  says  it  was  high  treason 
even  to  speak  against  him.  *Lo!  a  species  of 
despotism,'  he  adds,  'founded  contrary  to  the 
principles  of  Montesquieu  upon  love  and  affec- 
tion.' Bos  well  found  the  devotion  to  the  gen- 
eralissimo so  ardent  that  he  was  regarded  as 
'above  humanity.'  It  was  commonly  believed 
that  he  would  in  time  extend  the  Corsican  con- 

7  From  an  anonymous  pamphlet,  A  Review  of  the  Conduct  of 
Pascal  Paoli,  London,  1770, 


A  NEW  NATION  43 

quests  beyond  the  limits  of  the  island.  He  had 
already  captured  the  island  of  Capraja,  and  he 
was  expected  to  make  a  descent  on  Genoa  itself. 
He  was  revered  by  his  people  for  his  founding  of 
a  university  at  Corte,  as  well  as  for  his  attention 
to  the  humbler  needs  of  the  community  in  his  in- 
troduction of  the  potato.  But  in  all  his  manifold 
activity  there  was  no  suggestion  of  such  a  confi- 
dence in  his  people  as  would  lead  him  to  the  adop- 
tion of  the  views  of  a  Rousseau.  In  this,  as  in 
other  familiar  instances,  the  radical  theories 
were  the  offspring  of  the  philosopher  and  doc- 
trinaire, not  of  the  experienced  statesman. 

But  Rousseau  was  not  the  only  person  who 
devised  a  system  of  government  for  Corsica. 
Mrs.  Catharine  Macaulay,  Johnson's  *republi- 
ican'  friend,  whom  Horace  Walpble  called  'a 
brood-hen  of  faction,'  addressed  a  pamphlet  to 
Paoli,  entitled  A  Short  Sketch  of  a  Democrati- 
col  Form  of  Government,^  Long  ere  this  she  had 
boldly  declared  that  all  forms  of  government 
which  have  been  'imposed  on  credulous  man' 
have  been  defective,  since  they  have  not  estab- 
lished the  'full  and  impartial  security  of  the 
rights  of  nature,'  but  have  been  rather  'fonnid- 

8  London,  1767;  it  is  a  portion  of  a  larger  pamphlet  entitled, 
Loose  Remarks  on  Mr.  Hobbes's  Philosophical  Rudiments  of  Oov- 
ernment. 


44  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

able  and  dangerous  cabals  against  the  peace, 
happiness  and  dignity  of  society.'^  In  her  epistle 
to  Paoli  she  asserted  that  any  system  of  depend- 
ence was  destructive  of  the  virtues  inherent  in 
mankind.  The  'democratical'  form  of  a  republic 
is  the  only  system  that  can  hope  to  shun  this  peril. 
Mrs.  Macaulay  explains  to  the  General  that  she 
has  studied  *free  establishments'  with  care,  and 
it  is  clear  that  she  feels  competent  to  construct 
the  ideal  government  of  the  free.  The  plan, 
which  is  less  extreme  than  that  of  Rousseau,  need 
not  detain  us,  save  to  mention  her  proposal,  set 
down  almost  in  so  many  words,  that  the  govern- 
ment of  Corsica  ought  to  consist  of  a  senate  and 
a  house  of  representatives,  the  make-up  of  which 
should  be  changed,  by  gradual  degrees,  every 
three  years,  so  as  to  avoid  the  development  of 
any  privileged  or  governing  class. 

What  Paoli  thought  of  such  theories  of  gov- 
ernment it  would  be  interesting  to  know.  I  am 
not  aware  that  he  ever  paid  any  attention  to  Mrs. 
Macaulay;  but  he  certainly  wrote  a  letter  to  say 
that  he  would  be  glad  to  have  Rousseau  come  to 
the  island,  and  he  certainly  gave  Buttafuoco  per- 
mission to  use  his  name  in  requesting  Rousseau 
to  draw  up  the  constitution  which  has  been  de- 

9  Observations  on  'Thoughts  on  the  Present  Discontents/  Lon- 
don, 1770;  p.  8. 


A  NEW  NATION  46 

scribed.  But  there  is  not  the  slightest  reason  to 
suppose  that  he  would  have  regarded  himself  as 
bound  by  any  such  documents.  Paoli  had  every- 
thing to  gain,  not  by  securing  ideal  constitutions 
from  European  philosophers,  but  by  drawing  the 
attention  of  European  authors  and  statesmen  to 
the  present  condition  of  his  island.  He  seems 
to  have  said  something  of  the  kind  to  Andrew 
Bumaby  who  visited  the  island  in  1766,  and  who 
wrote : 

I  am  persuaded  that  General  Paoli  had  no  in- 
tention, when  he  sent  an  invitation  to  Monsieur 
Rousseau,  to  suffer  him,  an  entire  stranger  to  the 
country,  the  people,  the  customs,  and  almost 
everything  necessary  to  be  known  by  a  legislator, 
to  form  an  ideal  system  of  laws  and  then  impose 
them  upon  the  people.  He  was  aware  of  the  im- 
propriety of  this  on  several  accounts ;  principally 
on  that  of  their  not  being  in  a  state  ripe  for  the 
reception  of  any  entire  code  of  laws,  whatsoever. 
He  knew  that  their  manners  were  to  be  greatly 
changed  before  they  could  be  brought  to  such  a 
temperament;  that  they  were  to  be  prepared 
gradually;  were  to  be  formed  first  for  one  law, 
then  for  another;  each  separate  law  laying  a 
foundation  for  some  future  one,  and  by  these 
means  to  be  brought  imperceptibly  to  the  point 
he  was  desirous  of.  All  he  proposed  from  the 
presence  of  Rousseau  was  to  avail  himself  of  any 
hints  he  might  be  able  to  furnish  him  with;  and 


46  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

that  he  might  farther  have  the  use  of  his  pen  to 
describe  those  many  great  and  heroic  actions 
which  have  been  performed  by  the  Corsicans,  and 
which  none  but  the  pen  of  a  Rousseau  seems 
worthy  of  describing/^ 

But  the  most  famous  of  all  visitors  to  the 
island  was  James  Boswell.  Although  he  tells  us 
that  he  had  heard  of  Corsica  ever  since  he  was  a 
boy,  he  probably  had  no  great  interest  in  Corsica 
until  his  visit  to  Rousseau.  This  occurred  just 
at  the  close  of  the  year  1764,  at  the  moment  when 
the  philosopher  was  meditating  on  the  laws  which 
he  would  draw  up  for  the  new  nation.  He  filled 
Boswell  with  admiration  for  the  brave  islanders, 
and  fired  his  imagination  with  descriptions  of 
Corsica  as  the  cradle  of  liberty.  The  first  word 
in  the  Account  of  Corsica,  which  Boswell  put 
forth  three  years  after  his  visit,  is  liberty.  Lib- 
erty, he  says,  is  indispensably  necessary  to  our 
happiness,  whether  as  individuals  or  as  members 
of  society.  Indeed,  ^everything  worthy  arises 
from  it.'  When  he  came  into  the  presence  of 
Paoli,  he  paid  him  a  compliment  which  would 
have  been  fulsome,  had  it  not  expressed  the  set- 
tled conviction  of  liberal  Europe:  *Sir,  I  am 
upon  my  travels,  and  have  lately  visited  Rome. 

i^  Journal  of  a  Tour  to  Corsica  in  the  year  1766,  by  the  Revd. 
A.  Burnaby.    London,  ISffi. 


A  NEW  NATION  47 

I  am  come  from  seeing  the  ruins  of  one  brave  and 
free  people:   I  now  see  the  rise  of  another.' 

Boswell  was  the  first  Briton  to  visit  Corsica. 
His  impudence  in  presenting  himself,  at  the  age 
of  twenty-five,  to  General  Paoli  has  been  more 
often  dwelt  upon  than  his  intrepidity  in  going  to 
the  island  at  all.  About  the  same  time,  Rousseau 
confesses,  he  himself  was  deterred  from  going 
among  the  Corsicans  by  the  frightful  accounts 
which  he  received  of  the  people.  But  Boswell, 
who  was  somewhat  bored  by  his  study  of  antiqui- 
ties in  Italy,  desired  to  do  and  see  something 
unique  during  his  travels,  and  was  not  to  be 
deteiTcd.  He  proceeded  to  Corsica,  then,  in  the 
autumn  of  1765,  during  a  lull  in  the  fighting  and 
at  a  time  when  the  Genoese  had  been  all  but 
driven  out  of  the  island.  A  few  towns  had  been 
garrisoned  by  French  troops,  but  the  French  had 
promised  to  limit  their  occupancy  to  four  years. 
There  were,  at  the  moment,  therefore,  no  hostili- 
ties; nevertheless  there  was  grave  danger  of 
BoswelFs  being  mistaken  for  a  spy,  for  the  future 
was  still  uncertain.  Indeed,  as  PaoH  later  told 
Fanny  Burney,"  he  was  at  first  convinced  that 
Boswell  was  a  spy,  (or,  as  he  pronounced  the 
word,  an  espy) ,  because  the  young  fellow  at  once 
began  taking  notes  of  his  conversation.     When 

iiDiary  of  Mme.  D'Arhlay,  October  15,  1782. 


48  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

this  unhappy  delusion  was  dispelled,  Paoli  made 
much  of  his  visitor.  Perhaps  he  thought 
him  a  person  of  more  distinction  and  power  than 
was  really  the  case ;  perhaps  since  he  had  failed  to 
draw  Rousseau  to  the  island,  he  was  fain  to  put 
up  with  this  young  Scotsman  as  a  substitute,  and 
get  what  advertisement  and  influence  he  could  in 
England  through  him;  but,  however  all  this  be, 
certain  it  is  that  the  two  became  fast  friends.  It 
was  for  no  merely  international  reasons  that  the 
General  placed  Boswell  next  him  at  dinner,  per- 
mitted him  to  ride  on  his  own  horse  with  its  trap- 
pings of  crimson  and  gold,  and  presented  him 
with  his  own  pistols.  Boswell  himself  says  that 
the  attention  shown  him  as  a  subject  of  Great 
Britain  was  noised  abroad  in  Italy  and  confirmed 
the  notion  that  he  was  an  envoy.  The  peasants 
and  soldiers  called  him  the  amhasciadore  inglese. 
But  though  Boswell  was  not  an  English  envoy 
to  Corsica,  he  did  his  best  to  act  the  part  of  Cor- 
sican  envoy  to  England  when  he  returned.  Paoli 
well  knew  that  Boswell  intended  to  plead  the 
Corsican  cause.  *When  I  asked  him  what  I 
could  possibly  do  in  return  for  all  his  goodness 
to  me,  he  repHed,  Solamente  disingannate  il  suo 
corte.  Only  undeceive  your  court.  Tell  them 
what  you  have  seen  here.  They  will  be  curious  to 
ask  you.    A  man  come  from  Corsica  will  be  like 


<      c      c     c     c<:     ,        c 
cc        c     t   c   f     ,        ,. 


C  C      C       ^C     ,C  C  C 


lA    .>.J...      y</. 


«X<   HiS/il'i^c 


[»  ^n  t/w  I  ?'('/,» ly  <i/i  *  Vr//u</  CorficaB  CJiief ,  ({^  /w  ayi/t/aiul  at- 


A  NEW  NATION  49 

a  man  come  from  the  Antipodes.  I  expressed 
such  hopes  as  a  man  of  sensibility  would  in  my 
situation  naturally  form.  He  saw  at  least  one 
Briton  devoted  to  his  cause.  I  threw  out  many 
flattering  ideas  of  future  political  events,  imaged 
the  British  and  the  Corsicans  strictly  united  both 
in  commerce  and  in  war,  and  described  the  blunt 
kindness  and  admiration  with  which  the  hearty, 
generous  common  people  of  England  would  treat 
the  brave  Corsicans.' 

It  has  been  customary  among  critics  to  laugh 
at  Boswell's  efforts  on  behalf  of  Corsica  as  a 
specimen  of  his  characteristic  presumption.  His 
efforts  have  indeed  their  comic  aspect,  and  it  is, 
moreover,  clear  that  in  all  his  activity  he  was 
more  than  wilhng  to  acquire  a  personal  renown 
as  *James  Boswell,  Esq.,  the  Corsican  traveller.' 
What  traveller  has  not  exaggerated  the  signifi- 
cance of  his  journeyings?  And  yet,  when  due  al- 
lowance has  been  made  for  all  this,  there  remain 
a  generous  devotion  to  a  cause  and  an  eagerness 
to  serve  a  friend  which  it  would  be  both  foolish 
and  cynical  to  deny.  Boswell  very  ardently 
wished  the  success  of  the  Corsican  cause,  and  pro- 
posed to  do  what  he  could  to  promote  it. 

He  took  back  with  him  a  suit  of  Corsican  at- 
tire by  means  of  which  he  hoped  to  stimulate  pub- 
lic interest  and  to  call  attention  to  himself.    He 


50  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

contrived  to  get  a  friend  to  present  him  to  the 
Prime  Minister,  and  actually  called  on  Lord 
Chatham,  wearing  this  Corsican  costume.  He 
had  much  to  say  on  behalf  of  Paoli  to  the  Prime 
Minister.  Had  not  Paoli  called  Chatham  the 
Pericles  of  Great  Britain?  Could  not  Great 
Britain  save  Corsica  by  a  nod  of  the  ministerial 
head?  This  interview  was  a  success — at  least 
Bos  well  was  pleased  with  it — and  a  remark  about 
Paoli  made  by  the  Minister  was  carefully  treas- 
ured: *It  may  be  said  of  Paoli  as  the  Cardinal 
de  Retz  said  of  the  great  Montrose,  "C'est  un  de 
ces  hommes  qu'on  ne  trouve  plus  que  dans  les 
Vies  de  Plutarque." ' 

Boswell  wore  this  same  costume  when  he  went 
to  the  Shakesperian  jubilee  at  Stratford  in  the 
autumn  of  1769.  He  published  an  account  of  the 
festivities  in  the  London  Magazine^  together 
with  a  print  of  himself  wearing  this  now  famous 
costume.  The  account  which  accompanies  it 
contains  the  following  paragraph: 

Of  the  most  remarkable  masks  upon  this  oc- 
casion was  James  Boswell,  Esqr.,  in  the  dress  of 
an  armed  Corsican  chief.  He  entered  the  amphi- 
theatre about  twelve  o'clock.  On  the  front  of  his 
cap  was  embroidered  in  gold  letters.  Viva  la 
Liberia^ — and  on  one  side  of  it  was  a  handsome 
blue  feather  and  cockade,  so  that  it  had  an  ele- 


A  NEW  NATION  51 

gant  as  well  as  a  warlike  appearance.  He  wore 
no  mask,  saying  that  it  was  not  proper  for  a  gal- 
lant Corsican.  So  soon  as  he  came  into  the 
room,  he  drew  universal  attention. 

In  Ireland,  whither  he  went  a-wooing  in  the 
spring  of  1769,  he  had  laid  the  cause  of  the  Cor- 
sicans  before  the  Lord  Lieutenant,  and  had  made 
many  friends  for  the  'gallant  islanders.'  Let  us 
hope  that  on  this  occasion,  too,  he  wore  his  cos- 
tume. 

But  his  aid  was  also  of  a  highly  practical  sort. 
He  raised  a  subscription  of  £700  in  Scotland,^^ 
and  purchased  ordnance  of  the  Carron  Company 
for  shipment  to  Corsica.  Besides  his  Account  of 
Corsica,  which  included  his  Journal  of  a  Tour  to 
Corsica,  he  superintended  the  collection  and  pub- 
lication of  a  series  of  essays,  entitled  Bntish  Es- 

12  The  following  letter  to  the  Gentleman's  Magazine  for  Novem- 
ber, 1768,  is  almost  certainly  by  Boswell,  bearing  on  its  face  the 
mark  of  his  familiar  style.  He  was  fond  of  addressing  letters  to 
the  magazine. 

Mr.  Urban, 

The  generosity  of  his  grace  the  Duke  of  Devonshire,  Lord 
Algernon  Piercy,  and  Sir  Watkins  Williams  Wynne,  now  on  their 
travels  at  Florence,  in  favour  of  the  deserted  Corsicans,  deserves 
a  place  in  your  valuable  Magazine;  these  young  travellers,  on  the 
first  news  of  the  French  invasion,  remitted  to  Paoli  the  sum  of 
2000  1.  each,  by  which  seasonable  supply  he  has  been  enabled  to 
make  those  brave  efforts  for  the  preservation  of  the  liberty  of 
his  country  that  have  astounded  all  Europe. 

E.  Y. 

P.S.  It  is  remarkable  that  among  the  lovers  of  liberty  in 
Scotland  contributions  have  been  raised  for  the  brave  Corsicans, 
while  in  England  the  people  have  only  wished  their  success. 


62  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

says  in  behalf  of  the  Brave  Corsicans,  by  several 
hands,^^  These  were  all  directed  to  a  very  prac- 
tical end,  British  intervention  to  save  Corsica 
from  being  swallowed  up  by  France.  The  en- 
graved frontispiece  shows  an  allegorical  figure  of 
Corsica,  accompanied  by  a  dog,  the  symbol  of 
fidelity,  fleeing  to  Britannia  for  protection  from 
France,  who  pursues  her  in  a  menacing  attitude. 
This  frontispiece  is  the  redeeming  feature  in  a 
very  dull  volimie.  There  is  much  in  the  book 
about  the  rights  of  man  and  Corsica  as  the  for- 
tress of  liberty,  but  the  mark  of  'propaganda'  is 
upon  the  essays  one  and  all,  so  that  they  can 
hardly  lay  claim  to  any  literary  character  what- 
soever. Inasmuch  as  it  was  necessary  to  publish 
the  volume  anonymously,  as  voicing  the  mind  of 
a  large  though  unidentified  public,  it  necessarily 
lacked  that  personal  touch  which  distinguishes 
everything  else  that  Bos  well  ever  wrote,  and 
which  makes  even  his  proof -corrections  dehghtful 

Reading. 

1  It  was  necessary,  if  anything  were  to  be  done 
for  Corsica,  to  act  and  act  quickly.  England 
decided  not  to  act.  The  cause  of  Corsican  inde- 
pendence was  lost  for  ever  and  the  French  ob- 

13  So  far  as  I  know,  no  effort  has  been  made  to  discover  the 
authorship  of  these  various  essays.  Most  of  them,  I  fear,  were 
from  Boswell's  own  hand,  although  his  friend  Sir  Alexander  Dick 
and  one  or  two  others  certainly  lent  assistance. 


A  NEW  NATION  5S 

tained  a  foothold  in  the  Mediterranean.  It  had 
been  necessary  for  Genoa  to  appeal  for  aid  to 
France,  and  the  negotiations  ended  by  the  treaty 
of  1769,  in  which  Genoa  ceded  the  island  to  the 
crown  of  France.  For  a  time  Paoli  struggled; 
but  sank  at  last  under  the  enormous  superiority 
of  the  enemy.  The  neutrality  of  the  British  be- 
came a  theme  for  scornful  hberals.  'Sympathy 
for  Corsica,'  writes  G.  O.  Trevelyan,^*  Vas  as 
much  the  fashion  with  the  English  Whigs  as  . 
sympathy  for  America  became  seven  years  later,  J 
among  thei  more  enlightened  members  of  the 
French  nobility.  .  .  .  The  theory  that  British 
interests  would  suffer  by  our  acquiescence  in  the 
subjugation  of  Corsica — a  theory  backed  by  the 
high  authority  of  Frederick  the  Great — was 
warmly  urged  by  Shelburne  in  the  Cabinet,  and 
would  have  prevailed  but  for  the  strenuous  oppo- 
sition of  the  Bedfords.' 

Great  was  the  dismay  when  it  was  learned  that 
the  Government  proposed  to  leave  Corsica  to  her 
fate.  Many  regarded  it  as  a  new  indication  of 
the  fatal  luxury  of  the  times.  The  anonymous 
poet  who  printed  Corsica,  a  Poetical  Address,  in 
1769,  attributed  the  base  neutrahty  to 

*The  lust  of  power,  the  sordid  thirst  of  gain,' 

^^  Early  History  of  C.  /.  Fox,  chap.  IV. 


54  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

as  well  as  to  'pleasure's  poisonous  draught.' 
England  was  disinclined  to  go  to  war.  'Foolish 
as  we  are/  said  Lord  Holland,  'we  cannot  be  so 
foolish  as  to  go  to  war  because  Mr.  Boswell  has 
been  in  Corsica,  and  yet,  believe  me,  no  better 
reason  can  be  given  for  siding  with  the  vile  in- 
habitants of  one  of  the  vilest  islands  in  the  world, 
who  are  not  less  free  than  all  the  rest  of  their 
neighbours,  and  whose  island  will  enable  the 
French  to  do  no  more  harm  than  they  may  do  us 
at  any  time  from  Toulon.'^^ 

The  British  received  Paoli  with  all  cordiahty 
when  he  came  as  a  refugee  to  London.  The  king 
granted  him  an  audience,  and  a  pension  of  a 
thousand  a  year  from  the  exchequer.  Paoli  seems 
to  have  reconciled  himself  to  Hfe  in  England, 
which  Boswell  took  care  to  make  delightful  for 
him.  He  resided  in  London  for  the  next  twenty 
years,  until  the  French  Revolution  brought  him 
once  more  to  political  prominence.  Corsica,  too, 
consented  to  live,  though  the  threat  had  been 
made  that  she  would  shed  every  drop  of  her  dear 
blood  before  she  would  consent  to  be  again  a 
slave.  Peace  doth  recant  vows  made  in  war.  In 
time  Corsica  was  able  to  console  herself  for  her 
slavery  by  producing  a  man  who  was  to  reign  as 
emperor  over  these  French  enslavers;  for  one  of 

15  From  G.  O.  Trevelyan's  Early  History  of  Fox,  chap.  IV. 


A  NEW  NATION  65 

the  indirect  results  of  the  sale  of  the  island  to 
France  was  that  Napoleon  Bonaparte  was  born 
a  French  citizen.  Baron  Stendhal  places  near 
the  beginning  of  his  JLife  of  Napoleon  a  compari- 
son of  Paoli  and  Bonaparte.  *Paoli,'  he  says,  *fut 
comme  le  type  et  I'image  de  toute  la  vie  future  de 
Napoleon.' 

But  all  this  is  far  from  our  theme.  The  grief 
that  followed  the  collapse  of  the  Corsican  hopes 
was  more  than  that  occasioned  by  the  mere  defeat 
of  a  gallant  little  people.  The  generous-minded 
had  looked  to  Corsica  as  something  more  than  a 
group  of  patriots  desirous  of  changing  their 
form  of  government.  It  had  been  more  than  a 
republic  that  was  being  founded;  it  was  an  ideal 
that  was  being  put  into  a  world  of  reality,  a  hope 
that  burned  in  the  minds  of  men,  a  belief  that  it 
might  yet  be  possible  to  purify  the  hearts  and 
moderate  the  passions  of  mankind,  until  brother- 
ly love  should  replace  national  rivalries,  and  put 
an  end  to  war.  Liberty,  equality,  fraternity — the 
words  are  commonplace  and  tawdry  enough  to- 
day; but  in  1769  they  were,  at  least  in  their  prac- 
tical application  to  the  life  of  nations,  as  fresh  as 
an  April  dawn  and  as  full  of  promise. 
The  promise  faded  and  the  hope  decayed; 
only  to  revive  in  the  next  decade — in  a  form 
which  needs  no  reference  here.     But,  for  the 


56  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

moment,  hearts  were  embittered,  for  boundless 
had  been  the  hopes  of  what  mankind  might 
accomphsh  in  a  state  of  freedom.  And  now  the 
spirit  of  man  had  made  its  great  refusal.  It  was 
not  to  be  released  from  the  'meagre,  stale,  forbid- 
ding ways  of  custom,  law,  and  statute.'  It  had 
failed  in  the  testing  hour. 
"^  And  with  these  high  hopes  fell  the  belief  that 
a  new  era  had  opened  for  poetry  and  the  arts. 
The  dawn  had  seemed  to  be  breaking.  The  sons 
of  a  rugged  island  had  risen  in  native,  God-cre- 
ated majesty,  and  soon  might  be  expected  to  sing 
a  new  song  to  the  world. 

Th'  immortal  Muse, 
Fired  by  the  voice  of  Freedom,  soars  sublime, 

said  the  poet  of  Corsica.      Miss  Aikin,  too,  had 
felt  the  fire  of  prophecy  descend  upon  her: 

Then  shall  the  shepherd's  pipe,  the  muse's 

lyre, 
On  Cymus'  shores  be  heard.    Her  grateful 

sons 
With  loud  acclaim  and  hymns  of  cordial 

praise 
Shall  hail  their  high  deliverers. 

Paoli  himself  had  not  been  untouched  by  some 
of  these  high  hopes,  for  he  told  Boswell  that  arts 
and  sciences  were  not  to  be  expected  from  Cor- 
sica at  once;  but  that  in  twenty  or  thirty  years' 


A  NEW  NATION  57 

time,  the  island  would  be  able  to  display  them. — 
But  now  the  dream  was  over,  and  Corsica  had 
sunk  back  into  slavery. 

Corsica  may,  perhaps,  have  been  in  the  mind 
of  Boswell  on  those  nimierous  occasions  when  he 
led  Johnson  to  talk  about  the  nature  of  govern- 
ment. High  hopes  of  social-  regeneration  were 
no  characteristic  of  Johnson's  Tory  soul,  and  he 
enjoined  Boswell  to  clear  his  head  of  Corsica. 
As  for  himself,  he  would  not  give  half  a  guinea 
to  hve  under  one  form  of  government  rather  than 
another. 

It  would  be  an  agreeable  shifting  of  responsi- 
bility if  we  could  adopt  the  theory  that  human 
happiness  and  a  florescence  of  the  arts  depend 
upon  the  form  of  government  under  which  we 
live. 

In  every  government,  though  terrors  reign, 
Though  tyrant  kings  or  tyrant  laws  restrain,     [  i 
How  small,  of  all  that  human  hearts  endure. 
That  part  which  laws  or  king  can  cause  or 
cure. 

A  poet  may  of  course  be  less  contented  under 
one  form  of  government  than  another,  and  the 
public  indifference  to  his  art  may  receive  point 
and  emphasis  from  the  indifference  of  king  or 
minister;  but  it  is  difficult  to  discover  what  all 
this  coldness  has  to  do  with  the  poet's  singing 


68  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

voice.  A  government  can  neither  bestow  that 
nor  take  it  away.  When  all  else  fails,  when 
patrons  betray  and  the  guardians  of  the  public 
trust  capitulate,  when  virtue  goes  over  to  the 
world  and  truth  is  crushed  to  earth,  it  is  the  poet's 
hour.    Let  him  sing  of  his  broken  heart. 

Upon  this  subject  Lord  Chesterfield  had  ex- 
pressed himself  with  characteristic  sanity  some 
years  before.  His  words,  though  not  eloquent, 
have  a  certain  value,  especially  as  coming  from 
one  who  was  generally  regarded  as  belonging  to 
the  old  order  of  things : 

It  is  a  general  prejudice  and  has  been  propa- 
gated for  these  sixteen  hundred  years  that  arts 
and  sciences  cannot  flourish  under  an  absolute 
government,  and  that  genius  must  necessarily  be 
cramped  where  freedom  is  restrained.  This 
sounds  plausible,  but  is  false  in  fact.  Mechanic 
arts,  as  agriculture,  manufactures,  etc.,  will  in- 
deed be  discouraged  where  the  profits  and  prop- 
erty are,  from  the  nature  of  a  government,  in- 
secure. But  why  the  despotism  of  a  government 
should  cramp  the  genius  of  a  mathematician,  an 
astronomer,  a  poet,  or  an  orator,  I  confess  I 
never  could  discover.  It  may  indeed  deprive  the 
poet  or  the  orator  of  the  liberty  of  treating  cer- 
tain subjects  in  the  manner  they  would  wish; 
but  it  leaves  them  subjects  enough  to  exert  gen- 
ius upon,  if  they  have  it.^^ 

^^  Letters  to  his  Son,  February  7,  1749. 


A  NEW  NATION  69 

What,  pray,  was  to  prevent  the  Corsicans  from 
singing, — except,  indeed,  a  lack  of  bards?  If 
there  had  been  potential  singers,  ready  to  break 
into  song  in  the  hour  of  victory,  why  might  they 
not,  with  garland  and  singing  robes  about  them, 
have  grown  lyrical  upon  the  subject  of  their 
wrongs  ? 

Most  wretched  men  are  cradled  into  poetry 

by  wrong: 
They  learn  in  suffering  what  they  teach  in 

song. 

A  rebirth  of  poetry  was  to  occur  in  England  in 
the  next  decade,  that  of  the  'eighties.  It  saw  the 
emergence  of  William  Cowper  and  Wilham 
Blake,  of  George  Crabbe  and  Robert  Burns. 
Think  for  a  moment  whether  the  reign  of 
George  III,  which  we  of  America  have  been 
prone  to  describe  as  tyrannous,  exercised  any 
chilling  or  restraining  influence  upon  these  men. 
Can  it,  on  the  other  hand,  be  said  to  account  for 
their  inspiration?  None  of  them  was  perhaps 
wholly  uninterested  in  the  government  under 
which  he  lived;  but  none  of  them,  so  far  as  I  am 
aware,  dreamed  of  awaiting  the  perfection  of 
that  government  before  beginning  to  sing.  Two 
of  them  became  passionately  interested  in  the 
French  Revolution  (which  has  long  done  service 
in   accounting   for   the   inspiration   of   English 


60  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

poets) ;  but  the  Revolution  was  undreamed  of 
when  these  men  made  their  definitive  appearance 
in  the  poetic  world.  Three  of  the  poets  sang  in 
spite  of  a  poverty  bitter  enough  to  have  chilled  the 
ardour  of  any  man ;  and  the  fourth  spoke  from  a 
heart  heavy  with  the  dread  of  approaching  mad- 
ness. And  yet,  in  spite  of  all  the  wrong  and  the 
woe  which  they  knew  so  well,  they  were  the  her- 
alds of  the  dawn,  the  symbols  of  a  new  order. 
But  the  explanation  of  their  representative  posi- 
tion is  not  found  in  either  the  restraint  or  the 
extension  of  their  personal  liberty  or  that  of  the 
nation  to  which  they  belonged ;  for  the  dayspring 
of  poetry,  whether  it  appear  in  Corsica  or  in 
England,  in  Paris  or  in  Princeton,  is  from  on 
high. 


Ill 

ANCIENT  BARD  AND  GENTLE 
SAVAGE 

But  heed,  ye  hards,  that  for  the  sign  of  onset 
Ye  sound  the  antientest  of  all  your  rhymes. 
Whose  birth  Tradition  notes  not,  nor  who  framed 
Its  lofty  strains, 

— Mason,  Caractacu^. 

The  leading  English  poet  of  the  mid-eight- 
eenth century,  the  man  who  was  most  tremulous- 
ly responsive  to  its  changing  manner  and  enlarg- 
ing thought,  lived  in  almost  complete  retirement 
from  the  world.  To  his  contemporaries  Thomas 
Gray  must  have  seemed  detached  from  every- 
thing that  could  reveal  the  true  literary  move- 
ment of  the  day — a  fatally  isolated  and  academic 
figure.  In  1750  he  had  finally  published,  after 
incredible  elaboration,  a  poem  which  became  at 
once  the  most  popular  in  the  language,  the  fa- 
mous Elegy.  But  of  all  poets  then  living  Gray 
was  perhaps  the  least  fitted  to  enjoy  the  promi- 
nence and  popularity  which  he  had  achieved;  he 
was  not  only  shy,  but  like  most  shy  people,  some- 
what cynical  as  well,  hurt  by  censure  yet  uncon- 

61 


62  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

vinced  by  praise,  self-conscious  when  he  should 
have  been  self-assertive,  and  with  a  large  con- 
tempt for  the  vulgar,  even  when  they  united  in 
his  praise.  Any  other  poet  than  Gray  would 
have  been  profoundly  influenced  by  the  success 
of  the  Elegy;  it  would  have  fixed  the  character 
of  his  literary  production  for  many  years.  But 
Gray  never  made  a  second  attempt.  His  eager 
and  changeful  interests  had  passed  on  to  a  type 
of  poetry  as  different  from  the  Elegy  as  may 
easily  be  conceived.  Four  years  after  the  pro- 
duction of  his  masterpiece  he  began  the  composi- 
tion, in  his  hesitant  fashion,  of  two  Pindaric 
odes,  cast,  to  be  sure  in  an  antique  mould,  but 
filled  with  new  themes,  and  in  the  most  remark- 
able manner  prophetic  of  the  literary  movement 
of  the  next  two  decades.  It  has  long  been  com- 
|i  mon  to  remark  that  in  Gray's  poetry  we  have  an 
•i  epitome  of  that  of  his  age.  This  reputation, 
surprising  enough  for  a  poet  so  essentially 
academic  as  Gray,  is  the  more  unusual  be- 
cause of  his  lack  of  one  of  the  fundamental 
poetic  qualities.  Gray  lacked  passion,  and  he 
knew  it.  He  was  by  nature  pensive,  melan- 
choly, scholastic;  there  was  none  of  that  *wild 
dedication  of  himself  so  characteristic  of  ro- 
manticism. Poetry  needed,  he  knew,  not  only 
'the  master's  hand,'  which  was  already  his,  but 


ANCIENT  BARD  63 

'the  prophet's  fire,'  which  was  by  no  means  his. 
This  lack  he  felt  not  only  in  himself,  but,  quite 
properl}^  in  the  poetry  (so-called)  which  was  be- 
ing produced  all  about  him/  The  more  he  dwelt 
upon  the  lack,  the  more  j  he  came  to  feel  that  this 
prophetic  fire  which  had  deserted  poetry  had  once 
been  its  most  characteristic  sign,  and  had,  in-| 
deed,  inspired  the  very  origins  of  the  art.  The 
farther  back  one  went  in  poetic  history,  the  more 
intense  was  this  passionate  utterance,  which  now 
the  age  had  lost.  Therefore,  for  the  Pindaric 
odes,  he  selected  subjects  which  permitted  him  to 
return,  at  least  in  imagination,  to  the  intenser 
passion  of  these  earlier  ages ;  perhaps  they  would 
touch  his  lips  as  with  a  living  coal.  The  Prog- 
ress  of  Poesy  is  a  typically  eighteenth  century 
theme,  in  which  the  tradition  of  poetry  is  fol- 
lowed from  ancient  Greece  down  to  Thomas 
Gray  himself,  but  the  poem  contains  very  re- 
markable novelties  and,  if  not  passion,  at  least 

1  But  not  to  one  in  this  benighted  age 
Is  that  diviner  inspiration  giv'n 
That  burns  in  Shakespeare's  or  in  Milton's  page — 
The  pomp  and  prodigality  of  heav'n. 

In  his  essay  on  Lydgate,  Gray  says: 

'I  fear  the  quickness  and  the  delicate  impatience  of  these  pol- 
ished times  in  which  we  live  are  but  the  forerunners  of  the  de- 
cline of  all  those  beautiful  arts  which  depend  upon  the  imagina- 
tion.' He  uses  both  'pomp'  and  'imagination'  of  the  Ossianic 
poetry   {infra,  p.  66). 


64  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

more  abandon  than  Gray  had  yet  permitted  him- 
self. 

I  desire  in  particular  to  direct  your  attention 
to  one  of  the  stanzas  which  is  conspicuous  for  its 
romantic  sub j  ect-matter : 

In  climes  beyond  the  solar  road, 
Where  shaggy  forms  o'er  ice-built  moun- 
tains roam, 
The  Muse  has  broke  the  twilight  gloom 
To  chear  the  shiv'ring  Native's  dull 
abode. 
And  oft,  beneath  the  od'rous  shade 
Of  Chili's  boundless  forests  laid. 
She  deigns  to  hear  the  savage  Youth  repeat 
In  loose  numbers  wildly  sweet 

Their  feather-cinctured  chiefs  and 
dusky  loves. 

Lapland  and  Chili  in  1754!  All  this,  we  may 
well  remind  ourselves,  is  nearly  twenty  years  be- 
fore that  renewal  of  interest  in  primitive  man 
which  ensued  upon  the  explorations  of  the  'six- 
ties, and  which  was  discussed  in  the  first  of  these 
lectures.  But  Gray's  digest  of  the  passage  in 
the  annotations  makes  it  still  more  worthy  of 
analysis.  'Extensive  influence  of  poetic  genius 
over  the  remotest  and  most  uncivilised  nations: 
its  connection  with  liberty  and  the  virtues  that 
naturally  attend  on  it.'  [Liberty,  it  appears, 
therefore,  is  as  much  the  need  of  poetry  as  of 


ANCIENT  BARD  66 

nations,  i  In  particular  Liberty  brings  into 
poetry  romantic  passion  (since  the  verse  is  to  be 
Vildly  sweet')  and  'loose  numbers.'  Liberty  is 
opposed  to  the  restraints  of  society,  the  inhibi- 
tions of  culture,  and  encourages  that  wild  dedi- 
cation of  oneself  to  dusky  love  and  feather-cinc- 
tured chief,  which  lends  a  vivid  passion  to  the 
verses.  And  the  'loose  numbers'? — or,  translat- 
ing into  French,  shall  we  say  vers  libres^.  Clear- 
ly, the  poetry  of  the  Chilian  savage  boy  will  not 
be  in  the  Pindaric  form!  Perhaps  it  will  be 
found  not  to  respect  the  bonds  of  metre,  but  to 
pour  its  ecstasy  in  some  lawless  though  eloquent 
mode,  while  Liberty  stands  smiling  by.  Perhaps, 
our  poet  may  have  felt,  the  language  of  passion 
is  inconsistent  with  the  regular  harmonies  and 
fixed  rhythm  of  eighteenth  century  verse.  Poets 
were  abandoning  the  heroic  couplet  for  blank 
verse,  for  'ode  and  elegy,  and  sonnet';  would  a 
perfect  obedience  to  the  law  of  Liberty  compel 
them  to  abandon  metre  entirely? 

Gray's  other  Pindaric  ode,  The  Bard,  is,  by 
common  consent,  the  more  romantic  of  the  two. 
I  will  not  analyse  so  familiar  a  poem,  but  only 
point  out  that  in  it  we  encounter,  as  the  poet's 
chief  creation,  the  figure  of  the  ancient  bard  him- 
self. The  author  no  longer  writes  about  primi- 
tive  song,   but   gives   us   the   primitive   singer. 


66  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

There  he  stands  upon  the  slopes  of  Snowdon,  and 
sings  forth  the  story  of  his  woe,  while  the  cruel 
troops  of  Edward  I  pass  through  the  valley  at 
his  feet. 

A  few  years  later,  under  the  influence  of  Os- 
sian,  Gray  wrote,  as  though  summarising  all  his 
earlier  views:  'Imagination  dwelt  many  hun- 
dred years  ago  in  all  her  pomp  on  the  cold  and 
barren  mountains  of  Scotland.  The  truth  (I  be- 
lieve) is  that,  without  respect  of  chmates,  she 
reigns  in  all  nascent  societies  of  men,  where  the 
necessities  of  life  force  everyone  to  think  and  act 
much  for  himself.'^ 

This  theory  of  Gray's  was  amusingly  set  forth 
in  Lloyd  and  Colman's  burlesque  of  The  Bard: 

Shall  not  applauding  critics  hail  the  vogue? 
Whether  the  Muse  the  style  of  Cambria's  sons, 
Or  the  rude  gabble  of  the  Huns, 
Or  the  broader  dialect 
Of  Caledonia  she  affect, 
Or  take,  Hibernia,  thy  still  ranker  brogue? 

With  Gray's  these  satirists  coupled  the  name 
of  a  contemporary  poet  and  dear  friend,  Wil- 
liam Mason,  who  is  still  remembered  for  two 
verse-tragedies  in  the  Greek  style,  Elfrida  and 
Caractacus,  The  second  of  them  is  closely  con- 
nected with  the  present  subject  because  it  was 

2  Gray  to  Brown,  February  8,  1763. 


ANCIENT  BARD  67 

composed  under  the  influence  of  Gray  and  with 
his  careful  assistance  and  criticism.  Indeed,  the 
drama  itself  is  plainly  inspired  by  The  Bard; 
only  instead  of  a  single  minstrel,  with  harp  and 
streaming  beard,  we  have  a  whole  chorus  of  them, 
who  sing  strophic  odes  antiphonally,  and  com- 
ment on  the  action  of  the  piece  after  the  manner 
of  the  chorus  in  a  Greek  tragedy.  The  life  of 
these  minstrels  is  well  described  by  one  of  the 
characters  of  the  drama : 

Yonder  grots 
Are  tenanted  by  bards,  who  nightly  thence, 
Robed  in  their  flowing  vests  of  innocent  white. 
Descend  with  harps  that  glitter  to  the  moon. 
Hymning  immortal  strains. 

The  subject  of  this  tragedy  is  the  betrayal  and 
capture  of  Caractacus,  the  aged  British  leader, 
and  the  slaughter  in  battle  of  Arviragus,  his  only 
son,  the  great  general  of  the  Britons.  Arviragus 
is  himself,  one  of  the  tribe  of  heroic  savages;  ex- 
cept for  colour,  he  is  cousin-german  to  Oroonoko, 
for  he  is  animated  by  all  the  generous  impulses 
and  nobility  of  soul  that  distinguish  the  genus. 
The  action  of  the  piece  passes  in  the  sacred  grove 
of  the  Druids,  in  the  midst  of  which  stands  an 
altar  surrounded  by  a  Druid  circle  of  stones; 
there  is  the  usual  background  of  brawling  stream, 
cliffs,    and    yawning    chasms.      The    Principal 


68  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Druid  speaks  for  the  British  nation,  and  his  at- 
tendant bards  sing  the  odes. 

These  lyrical  passages  are  certainly  the  best 
poetry  Mason  ever  wrote.  Gray  admired  them 
intensely.  They  were  afterwards  excerpted  from 
the  drama,  and  made  into  an  oratorio,^  for  which 
Dr.  Arne  wrote  the  music.  Of  the  many  odes 
which  the  play  contains  this  is,  perhaps,  the  best. 
It  bears  some  sHght  resemblance  to  the  lyrics  in 
Byron's  Manfred: 

Mona  on  Snowdon  calls: 
Hear,  thou  king  of  mountains,  hear; 

Hark,  she  speaks  from  all  her  strings; 

Hark,  her  loudest  echo  rings ; 
King  of  mountains,  lend  thine  ear, 

Send  thy  spirits,  send  them  soon. 

Now  when  Midnight  and  the  Moon 
Meet  upon  thy  front  of  snow: 

See,  their  gold  and  ebon  rod. 

Where  the  sober  sisters  nod, 
And  greet  in  whispers  sage  and  slow. 
Snowdon,  mark  I     'tis  Magic's  hour. 

To  the  already  numerous  bards  in  our  midst 
there  is  now  added  a  further  company  of  phan- 
tom bards : 

Snowdon  has  heard  the  strain: 
Hark,  amid  the  wondering  grove. 
Other  harpings  answer  clear, 

8  The  Lyrical  Part  of  Caractacus,  London,  1776. 


ANCIENT  BARD  69 

Other  voices  meet  our  ear; 
Pinions  flutter,  shadows  move, 

Busy  murmurs  hum  around, 

Rustling  vestments  brush  the  ground; 
Round  and  round  and  round  they  go, 

Thro'  the  twihght,  thro'  the  shade. 

Mount  the  oak's  majestic  head, 
And  gild  the  tufted  mistletoe. 
Cease  ye  glittering  race  of  light, 
Close  your  wings,  and  check  your  flight. 
Here  arranged  in  order  due, 
Spread  your  robes  of  saffron  hue; 
For  lo,  with  more  than  mortal  fire. 
Mighty  Mador  smites  the  lyre: 
Hark,  he  sweeps  the  master-strings. 

Whatever  you  may  think  of  Mason's  verses,  you 
will  observe  that  he  has  outdone  Gray  in 
depicting  the  life  of  the  bard,  not  of  course  be- 
cause he  has  multiplied  the  number  of  singers, 
but  because  he  has  aspired  to  show  the  bard  at 
what  he  conceived  to  be  the  bardic  task  of  guid- 
ing the  destinies  of  a  people.  His  was  the  *mas- 
ter's  hand,  the  prophet's  fire'  in  ancient  Britain. 
The  entire  picture  is  highly  idealised  of  course, 
as  are  the  'loose  numbers'  of  the  bard,  which 
he  often  permits  in 

unbridled  course  to  rush 
Thro'  dissonance  to  concord,  sweetest  then 
Ev'n  when  expected  harshest. 


\ 


70  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Mason  seems  to  have  felt  that  he  could  best  give 
an  impression  of  free  verse  by  exchanging  the 
regularities  of  iambic  rhythm  for  the  continual 
variations  of  the  strophic  ode.  We  are  not  of 
course  to  assume  that  he  supposed  that  the  an- 
cient bards  actually  sang  anything  Hke  them. 
The  use  of  a  strophic  form  was  as  far  as  Mason, 
who  was  in  no  sense  an  original  person,  dared  to 
go.  Gray  had  chosen  this  as  the  most  fitting 
modern  medium  for  the  bardic  chant,  and  Mason 
instinctively  followed  the  lead  of  his  master. 
The  real  step  in  the  direction  of  loose  numbers' 
was  to  be  taken  by  Mason's  successor  who,  aban- 
doning fixed  metres  altogether,  represented  the 
bard  as  singing  rhythmic,  or,  if  you  will,  poly- 
phonic, prose. 

The  bardic  figure  had  now  reached  a  high  de- 
gree of  imaginative  development — so  high,  in- 
deed, that  a  need  was  felt  for  something  more 
substantial  than  a  poet's  dream  of  what  a  bard 
might  have  sung.  Oh,  for  the  song  itself,  the 
very  words  of  the  minstrel  of  Nature,  as  he  sang 
them  to  the  British  warrior  thirteen  hundred 
years  ago! 

And  pat  it  came — just  at  the  moment  when 
the  public  was  prepared  to  receive  it,  in  the  line 
of  direct  descent  from  Mason  and  from  Gray — 
the  poems  of  Ossian,  son  of  Fingal,  ancient  Brit- 


IN     G     A     L 

A      N 

ANCIENT    EPIC    POEM, 

In      SIX       BO    O     K    S  5 

Together  with  feveral  other  POEMS,    compofed  hj 

OSSIAN    the  Son   of   F  I  N  G  A  L. 

Tranflated  from  the  Galic  Language, 

By    JAMES    MAC  P  HER  SO  N^^ 
Fortia  faSfa  pairum^  Tirgil. 


L    O    M    D    O    Ni 
Pfiated  for  T*  Beckit   and  P.  A.  De  Hondt,   in  the  Strand 

M  DCC  Lxa 


ANCIENT  BARD  71 

ish  bard  of  the  third  century  A.D.,  filled  with  the 
prophet's  fire,  sung  in  loose  numbers  wildly 
sweet,  in  honour  of  the  chieftains  of  old,  passion- 
ate, sad  as  the  wind  that  sobbed  over  Morven, 
the  joy  of  heroes,  the  consolation  of  the  bereaved. 
The  dream  of  Gray  come  true!  The  highly- 
coloured  imaginings  of  Mason  outstripped  by  the 
authentic  facts  of  history!  But  were  they  au- 
thentic? Caractacus  was  published  in  the  spring 
of  1759,  the  first  volume  of  Ossianic  poetry  in  the 
autumn  of  1760.  The  sequence  was  suspicious. 
Ossian,  when  one  thought  it  all  out  in  cool  blood, 
had  come  a  little  too  pat.  There  is  no  necessity 
of  rehearsing  here  the  well-known  history  of  the 
publication — within  four  short  years — of  the  Os- 
sianic epics  and  lyric  fragments  which  are  now 
known  to  have  been  almost  entirely  the  work  of  a 
young  Scots  clergyman,  James  Macpherson, 
with  a  gift  for  making  vague  sublimities  moan 
through  polyphonic  prose.  On  the  title-page  of 
the  epic,  Fingal  (Macpherson's  second  Ossianic 
^discovery ' ) ,  is  a  beautiful  engraving  of  the  bard 
himself,  exactly  as  the  bard  had  been  conceived 
in  the  previous  decade.  The  blind  harper,  clad 
in  flowing  robes,  'with  beard  that  rests  on  his 
bosom,'  sits  before  the  caves  and  crags,  already 
dear  to  the  romantic  heart,  and  sings  a  tale  of 
the  olden  time. 


72  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

The  essential  similarity  between  the  creations 
of  Gray  and  of  Macpherson  is  attested  by  the 
immediate  interest  which  the  former  poet  took 
in  the  Ossianic  publications  and  his  eagerness  to 
have  their  authenticity  proved.  In  the  end,  he 
seems  to  have  accepted  them  as  genuine. 

No  less  important  than  the  influence  of  Ossian 
upon  the  literatures  of  Europe  was  the  counter 
effect  of  the  bardic  tradition  in  getting  specimens 
of  genuinely  primitive  poetry  brought  to  public 
attention.  Temora,  the  last  of  Macpherson's  Os- 
sianic forgeries,  appeared  in  1763,  the  same  year 
in  which  Percy  put  forth  his  Five  Pieces  of 
Runic  Poetry  from  the  Icelandic.  In  the  next 
year  Evan  Evans  published  his  Specimens  of  the 
Poetry  of  the  Antient  Welsh  Bards,  which  was 
followed  in  1765  by  Percy's  Reliques  of  Ancient 
English  Poesy.  It  is,  perhaps,  correct  to  say 
that  the  Ossianic  forgeries  could  have  been  suc- 
cessfully published  only  in  the  decade  of  the  'six- 
ties; for  ten  years  earlier  there  would  have  been 
no  demand  for  them,  and  ten  years  later  too  much 
was  known  about  the  nature  of  early  narrative 
poetry — at  least  that  of  the  north — to  permit  of 
so  general  a  hoax. 

But  what  of  the  south?  In  The  Bard,  it  will 
be  recalled,  Gray  described  the  Muse  as  listening 


ANCIENT  BARD  78 

not  only  to  the  Icelandic  or  Lapland  peasant, 
but  also  to  the  savage  youth  of  the  boundless  for- 
ests of  Chili.  With  this  figure  it  was  far  more 
difficult  to  deal  than  with  the  ancient  bard  be- 
cause there  was  a  total  lack  of  acquaintance  with 
the  religion,  folk-lore,  and  customs  of  the  Malay, 
the  African,  and  the  American.  The  idealisa- 
tion of  the  redskin  belongs  to  a  later  generation.* 
Smollett's  description  of  the  Indians  in  Hum- 
phry Clinker  is  the  most  extravagant  burlesque 
— the  humour  of  the  comic  supplement — except 
where,  by  way  of  sneering  at  the  French  Jesuits, 
he  represents  the  Indian's  religion  of  Nature  as 
superior  to  Catholicism. 

The  negro  was  a  somewhat  more  popular  fig- 
ure, though  the  full  tide  of  sympathy  was  de- 
layed for  ten  years  or  so.     Nevertheless  Dr. 

*  I  have  of  course  not  attempted  even  a  sketch  of  the  long  and 
fascinating  history  of  the  sentimentalised  savage,  whether  red  or 
black,  Icelandic  or  Malay.  I  am  concerned  only  with  the  sudden 
revival  of  interest  in  him  which,  as  I  have  said  before,  is  con- 
nected with  the  explorations  of  the  eighteenth  century  navigators. 
To  trace  the  origin  of  the  idealised  redskin  would  take  one  back 
at  least  to  Lope  da  Vega,  who  in  the  second  act  of  El  Nuevo 
Mundo  represents  a  group  of  Indians  as  singing  an  antiphonal 
chant  to  the  Sun,  which  contains  allusions  to  Phoebus  and  Diana. 
[This  reference  I  owe  to  my  friend  Professor  Stoll.]  In  Eng- 
land the  tradition  is  at  least  as  old  as  Florio. 

The  tendency  to  idealise  the  Indian  was  undoubtedly  furthered 
by  the  missionaries  who  desired  to  put  the  Indian  character  in 
the  best  possible  light. 


74  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Hawkesworth's  version  of  Oroonoko,  which  re- 
vived, in  a  disinfected  form,  Southerne's  old 
tragedy,  (which  was  itself  a  dramatisation  of 
Aphra  Behn's  novel),  was  acted  in  1775  with 
some  success.  In  this  the  noble  black  man  ap- 
peared in  his  usual  role  of  ethical  grandeur. 
This  version  of  Hawkesworth's  contains,  as  an 
addition  of  his  own,  a  song  supposed  to  be  sung 
by  the  slaves  on  a  West  Indian  plantation.  It 
has,  to  be  sure,  a  somewhat  operatic  ring  about  it. 

Come,  let  us  be  gay,  to  repine  is  in  vain. 
When  our  loss  we  forget,  what  we  lose  we 

retain ; 
Our  toils  with  the  day  are  all  ended  at  last ; 
Let  us  drown  in  the  present  all  thoughts  of 

the  past, 
All  the  future  commit  to  the  Powers  above 
Come,  give  us  a  smile  as  an  earnest  of  Love. 

Ah  no — it  will  not,  cannot  be ; 
Love,  Love,  and  Joy  must  still  be  free, 
The  toils  of  day  indeed  are  past, 
And  gentle  Evening  comes  at  last ; 
But  gentle  Evening  comes  in  vain 
To  soothe  the  slave  from  sense  of  pain. 

In  vain  the  Song  and  Dance  invite 
To  lose  reflection  in  delight; 
Thy  voice  thy  anxious  heart  belies, 
I  read  thy  bondage  in  thy  eyes : 
Does  not  thy  heart  with  mine  agree? 


ANCIENT  BARD  75 

Man,  Yes,  Love  and  Joy  must  both 

be  free. 
Woman.     Must  both  be  free,  for  both  dis- 
dain 
The  sounding  scourge  and  gall- 
ing chain. 
Man.  'Tis  true,  alas !  they  both  disdain 

The  sounding  scourge  and  gall- 
ing chain. 

Interest  in  the  passionate  children  of  the  south 
was  vastly  heightened  by  the  arrival  in  England 
of  Omai,  or  Omiah,  a  native  of  Ulitea  (now 
Raiatea),  brought  from  the  Society  Islands  by 
Captain  Furneaux  in  the  autumn  of  1774.  Omai, 
unlike  the  Esquimaux  described  in  a  previous 
lecture,  knew  how  to  make  himself  agreeable  to 
the  persons  he  met,  and  displayed  an  enthusiastic 
appreciation  of  civilisation.  Everyone  who  came 
into  contact  with  him  seems  to  have  liked  him, 
for  he  possessed  what  a  contemporary  called  the 
'unsuspecting  good-nature  of  childhood,'  a  re- 
spectful and  even  genteel  manner,  and  a  naive- 
te that  delighted  everybody.  Omai's  exact 
age  was  not  known,  but  he  was  somewhere  in  his 
twenties.  He  is  described  as  'tawny,'  with  the 
flat  nose,  and  thick  lips  of  the  Polynesian.  His 
hands  and  fingers  were  tattooed.  He  had  long 
black  hair  flowing  over  his  shoulders.     His  ex- 


76  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

pression    of    countenance    was    intelligent,    yet 
placid  and  kindly. 

Omai's  portrait  was  drawn  several  times  while 
he  was  in  England.  The  best  picture  of  him  is, 
in  my  opinion,  that  of  Nathaniel  Dance,  which 
was  engraved  by  the  Bartolozzi  in  October,  1774. 
Dance  has  not  only  indicated  the  sweet  temper 
of  the  savage,  but  has  produced  a  picture  of  use 
as  a  document  and  a  record.  Omai  is  shown  with 
his  long  hair  loose  over  his  shoulders,  and  with 
tattoo-marks  visible  on  his  hands  in  which  he  holds 
an  Otaheitan  stool  or  seat,  a  bag,  and  a  fan.  He 
is  arrayed  in  a  long  robe,  elaborately  wound 
about  his  shoulders  and  waist,  so  as  to  cover  his 
body,  with  the  exception  of  his  forearms,  feet, 
and  ankles,  which  are  bare.  This,  I  suppose,  was 
the  contemporary  notion  of  the  way  a  savage 
should  be  represented  in  art.  His  is  certainly  not 
the  Tahitan  costume,  of  the  simplicities  of  which 
we  are,  perhaps,  sufficiently  informed,  and  which 
would  not  serve  in  the  rigors  of  a  London 
autumn;  neither  is  it  the  costume  which  Omai 
wore  in  England  as  a  rule,  for  it  was  found  more 
convenient  for  him  to  don  the  conventional 
clothes  of  the  day ;  so  he  appeared  regularly  in  a 
reddish  brown  coat,  white  waistcoat,  breeches, 
and  sword — a  costume  which  pleased  him  and  the 
century  well  enough. 


Omai. 

From    an    engraving   by    Bartolozzi,    after   a    drawing   by    Nathaniel    Dance. 


'  c  ' 


ANCIENT  BARD  77 

Sir  Joshua  Reynolds  gives  a  different  picture 
of  Omai.^  He  was  impressed  by  the  dignity  of 
the  young  savage,  and  therefore  posed  him  in  a 
heroic  attitude  against  a  fanciful  Otaheitan  land- 
scape, which  is  perhaps  the  first  attempt  in  the 
history  of  English  art  to  depict  the  scenery  of 
Tahiti.  He  wears  the  flowing  robes  and  also  a 
turban.  Every  trace  of  barbarousness,  except 
the  bare  feet,  is  carefully  omitted  by  Reynolds, 
who  has  succeeded  in  lending  to  the  Polynesian 
savage  the  poise  and  regal  aloofness  of  an  Arab. 
Nothing  could  reveal  more  adequately  the  traits 
which  were  sought  for  in  the  gentle  savage.  Yet 
Reynolds's  picture  is  true  to  one  side  of  Omai, 
for  all  the  testimony  with  regard  to  him — and  we 
have  a  great  deal — constantly  emphasizes  his 
courtesy  and  self-restraint  under  the  strange  and 
difficult  conditions  into  which  he  had  been  thrust. 
Boswell  uses  the  word  elegance  to  describe  his  be- 
haviour, and  savs  that  Johnson  accounted  for  it 
on  the  ground  that  Omai  had  passed  his  time, 
while  in  England,  only  in  the  best  company.* 
Mrs.  Thrale  invited  Omai  to  her  home  at  Streat- 
ham,  where  he  was  introduced  to  Johnson,  who 
gave  the  following  account  to  Boswell:  *Sir, 
Lord  Mulgrave  and  he  dined  one  day  at  Streat- 

5  See  the  frontispiece  to  this  book, 
^Life,  Hill's  ed.,  vol.  3,  p.  8. 


78  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

ham ;  they  sat  with  their  backs  to  the  light  front- 
ing me,  so  that  I  could  not  see  distinctly;  and 
there  was  so  little  of  the  savage  in  Omai,  that  I 
was  afraid  to  speak  to  either,  lest  I  should  mis- 
take one  for  the  other.' 

Mrs.  Thrale  tells  us  that  when  Omai  beat 
Baretti  at  chess,  everybody  admired  the  savage's 
good-breeding  and  the  European's  impatience — 
a  subject  on  which  Johnson  delighted  to  tease 
Baretti.^ 

Omai  passed  a  large  part  of  his  time  with 
Lord  and  Lady  Sandwich  at  Hinchinbroke,  and 
there  is  said  to  have  been  woe  in  the  heart  of  the 
peeress  when  the  savage  left  her.  Omai  was  pre- 
sented at  court,  and  given  an  allowance  by 
George  III,  whom  he  addressed  by  the  delight- 
ful and  appropriate  name  of  King  Tosh.^  The 
author  of  the  anonymous  satire  entitled,  Omiah's 
Farewell,  inscribed  to  the  Ladies  of  London,^ 
calls  Omai  *the  courteous  Indian,'^*'  and  asserts 
that  *the  first  personages  of  the  kingdom'  were 
'assiduous  to  do  him  favours.'  In  truth,  Omai 
developed  a  very  real  preference  for  fine  society, 
and  showed  marked  indifference  to  the   lower 

7  Collison-Morley,  Baretti  and  his  Friends,  p.  220  et.  seq.  Cf. 
Hill,  Johnsonian  Miscellanies,  vol.  2,  p.  292. 

8  Tosh,  his  attempt  to  pronounce  'George.' 

9  London,  1776. 

10  i.e.,  *Savage.' 


ANCIENT  BARD  79 

classes,  a  characteristic  which  the  enthusiastic  be- 
lievers in  equality  and  fraternity  among  men  in 
a  state  of  nature  might  have  studied  to  their  con- 
siderable enlightenment. 

A  very  human  and  charming  side  of  Omai  is 
revealed  by  George  Colman  in  his  Random 
Recollections.  Colman,  when  a  little  boy,  met 
Omai  during  an  expedition  of  Sir  Joseph  Banks, 
the  botanist,  who  had  gone  into  Yorkshire  to 
gather  herbs.  Omai,  who  was  Hving  with  Banks 
at  the  moment,  took  a  fancy  to  *Tosh,'  as  he  called 
the  boy  George.  The  savage  and  the  youngster 
went  in  swimming  together,  and  Omai  carried 
George  on  his  back,  to  his  alternate  fear  and  de- 
light, for  the  boy  had  never  been  in  the  sea  be- 
fore. Omai  entertained  the  whole  party ;  gave  an 
exhibition  of  Otaheitan  cooking;  stalked  a  covey 
of  partridges  and  caught  one  in  his  hands — to  the 
horror  of  British  sportsmanship ;  seized  a  gallop- 
ing horse  by  the  tail  and  allowed  himself  to  be 
dragged  along  by  the  terrified  animal,  while  he 
gave  an  exhibition  of  agility  in  shunning  the 
flying  hoofs.  He  and  the  boy  made  up  a  lingo 
for  themselves,  half  Otaheitan,  half  Enghsh,  in 
which  they  contrived  to  jabber  to  their  mutual 
enlightenment.  What  boy  could  ask  for  a  bet- 
ter companion? 

Very  little  was  done  to  improve  Omai's  mind 


80  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

while  he  was  in  England.  It  was  even  roundly 
asserted  that  Banks  preferred  to  keep  him  in  a 
state  of  primitive  ignorance  as  an  object  of  curi- 
osity." Omai  himself  wished  to  learn  to  write, 
but  no  steps  were  taken  to  teach  him.  He  ap- 
pears to  have  had  no  regular  instruction  after 
leaving  his  first  teacher,  James  Burney,  who 
could  speak  Otaheitan.  He  was  obhged  to  'pick 
up'  what  English  he  could — with  the  usual  de- 
plorable results  of  that  process.  Nevertheless 
his  untutored  efforts  to  express  himself  are  more 
interesting  than  any  real  mastery  of  the  language 
could  have  been,  since  they  are  at  once  pointed, 
picturesque,  and,  often,  adequate.  Though  they 
convulsed  people  with  laughter,  they  beautifully 
illustrate  the  indebtedness  of  language  to  meta- 
phor and,  indeed,  reveal  the  essentially  poetic 
mind  of  the  savage.  Ice,  for  example,  which  he 
had  never  seen  before,  he  called,  appropriately 
enough,  stone-water.^^  Snow  was  similarly 
'white  rain.'  He  assumed  that  a  person  who  used 
snuff  was  satisfying  an  appetite,  and  therefore  in 
declining  the  offer  of  a  pinch,  said  simply,  'No 
tank  you,  Sir,  me  nose  be  no  hungry. '^^    He  even 

11  Sir  Joseph  Cullum's  notes,  first  published  by  Edward  Smith 
in  his  Life  of  Banks  (1911),  p.  41. 

12  Walpole's  Letters,  January  28,  1776. 

13  Cumberland  Letters,  October  10,  1774. 


ANCIENT  BARD  81 

experienced  difficulty  in  referring  to  the  familiar 
domestic  animals,  since,  as  a  Tahitan,  the  only 
quadrupeds  he  knew  were  the  hog,  the  dog,  and 
the  rat.  Therefore  he  instinctively  called  a  horse 
a  'big  hog.'  For  a  bull  in  a  field  he  early  ac- 
quired a  respect,  and  referred,  'reverentially,'  as 
Cohnan  puts  it,  to  a  'man-cow.' 

Fanny  Burney,  who  thought  that  Omai's  gra- 
cious manner  'shamed  Education,'  and  expatiated 
on  his  greatness  of  soul,  gives  a  good  account  of 
his  conversation^*  in  all  its  strangeness.  She  was 
vastly  amused  at  it,  though  she  found  it  difficult 
to  understand.  She  also  had  the  privilege  of 
hearing  Omai  sing  a  native  song,  and  though  she 
was  not  pleased,  her  account  may  be  given  in 
full.  It  may  serve  to  bring  us  back  to  the  sub- 
ject of  primitive  poetry: 

My  father,  who  fortunately  came  in  during  his 
visit,  asked  him  very  much  to  favour  us  with  a 
song  of  his  own  country,  which  he  had  heard  him 
sing  at  Hinchinbrooke.  He  seemed  to  be  quite 
ashamed;  but  we  all  joined  and  made  the  request 
so  earnestly,  that  he  could  not  refuse  us.  But 
he  was  either  so  modest,  that  he  blushed  for  liis 
own  performance,  or  his  residence  here  had  made 
him  so  conscious  of  the  barbarity  of  the  South 
Sea  Islands'  music,  that  he  could  hardly  prevail 
with  himself  to  comply  with  our  request;  and 

14  Early  Diary,  2.132. 


8^  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

when  he  did,  he  began  two  or  three  times,  before 
he  could  acquire  voice  or  firmness  to  go  on. 

Nothing  can  be  more  curious  or  less  pleasing 
than  his  singing  voice;  he  seems  to  have  none; 
and  tune  or  air  hardly  seem  to  be  aimed  at;  so 
queer,  wild,  strange  a  rumbling  of  sounds  never 
did  I  before  hear ;  and  very  contentedly  can  I  go 
to  the  grave,  if  I  never  do  again.  His  song  is 
the  only  thing  that  is  savage  belonging  to  him. 

The  story  that  the  words  told,  was  laughable 
enough,  for  he  took  great  pains  to  explain  to  us 
the  English  of  the  song.  It  appeared  to  be  a 
sort  of  trio  between  an  old  woman,  a  young  wo- 
man, and  a  young  man.  The  two  latter  are  en- 
tertaining each  other  with  praises  of  their  merits 
and  protestations  of  their  passions,  when  the  old 
woman  enters,  and  endeavours  to  faire  Vaimahle 
to  the  youth;  but,  as  she  cannot  boast  of  her 
charms,  she  is  very  earnest  in  displaying  her 
dress,  and  making  him  observe  and  admire  her 
taste  and  fancy.  Omiah,  who  stood  up  to  act  the 
scene,  was  extremely  droll  and  diverting  by  the 
grimaces,  minaudeiies,  and  affectation  he  as- 
sumed for  this  character,  examining  and  regard- 
ing himself  and  his  dress  with  the  most  conceited 
self-complacency.  The  youth  then  avows  his 
passion  for  the  nymph ;  the  old  woman  sends  her 
away,  and,  to  use  Omiah's  own  words,  coming 
forward  to  offer  herself,  says,  *Come!  marry  me!' 
The  young  man  starts  as  if  he  had  seen  a  viper, 
then  makes  her  a  bow,  begs  to  be  excused,  and 
runs  off. 


ANCIENT  BARD  88 

Though  the  singing  of  Omy  is  so  barbarous,  his 
actions,  the  expression  he  gives  to  each  character, 
are  so  original  and  so  diverting,  that  they  did  not 
fail  to  afford  us  very  great  entertainment  of  the 
risible  kind. 

Now  anyone  experienced  in  the  collection  of 
folk-lore  could  have  explained  to  Fanny  and  her 
father  that  they  had  gone  about  their  business  in 
a  singularly  unhappy  way.  They  had  first  made 
the  singer  self-conscious,  and  had  then  pennitted 
him  to  apologise  for  the  barbarity  of  his  song. 
Just  what  effect  Omai  expected  to  produce  I 
of  course,  cannot  say;  but  I  feel  certain  that, 
during  the  singing,  the  Burney  girls  must  fre- 
quently have  been  giggling — or  choking  down 
their  giggles — when  they  should  have  found 
something  of  a  truly  serious  import.  In  short, 
if  Miss  Burney  despised  Omai's  song,  it  was  be- 
cause she  did  not  know  how  to  listen  to  it.  She 
was  a  true  daughter  of  the  century.  Had  Omai 
sung  in  a  minor  key  something  vaguely  sublime 
and  wildly  passionate — had  he  somehow  or  other 
happened  to  recall  Ossian  to  her  mind — she 
would  have  been  transported  with  delight.  But 
there  was  no  hint  of  the  heroic  in  what  he  sang — 
no  note  of  primitive  passion.  He  was  not  the 
minstrel  of  the  tropics  singing  of  dusky  loves  and 
feather-cinctured  chiefs,  and  his  piece  was  in  no 


84  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

way  like  The  Bard  or  the  odes  of  Mason.  It  was 
something  quite  different  in  kind  from  the  poetry 
that  Miss  Burney  knew,  something  that  had  to 
be  explained  to  her,  something  queer  and  gro- 
tesque, like  the  decorations  on  an  Indian  pot,  of 
which,^  naturally,  she  had  never  heard.  But  the 
loose  numbers,  the  wild  sweetness,  the  bursting 
heart,  the  rude  eloquence  of  Nature — these  were 
not  in  it,  for  these  things  belong  to  romanticism, 
and  not  to  primitive  poetry. 

The  little  scrap  of  folk-lore  from  the  South 
Seas  which  found  its  final  resting-place  in  the 
vivacious  diary  of  Miss  Burney  bears  upon  it 
several  of  the  characteristic  marks  of  primitive 
poetry.  It  blends  poetry,  music,  and  dramatic 
action  into  a  single  product,  in  which  no  one  of 
the  three  component  elements  is  quite  distin- 
guishable from  the  others.  The  acting  and  the 
grimaces  of  Omai,  we  may  be  sure,  were  not  as- 
sumed for  the  mere  purpose  of  making  his  song 
intelligible  to  the  company,  but  were  vitally  nec- 
essary to  the  piece  as  he  had  received  it  from  tra- 
dition. 

When  Banks  was  first  in  Tahiti,  he  heard  some 
native  songs,^^  which  he  must  have  considered 
trivial  enough,  since  he  did  not  take  the  trouble 
to  record  them: 

15  Journal,  June  12,  1769. 


ANCIENT  BARD  85 

'There  was  a  large  concourse  of  people  round 
the  band,  which  consisted  of  two  flutes  and  three 
drums,  the  drummers  accompanying  their  music 
with  their  voices.  They  sang  many  songs,  gen- 
erally in  praise  of  us,  for  these  gentlemen,  like 
Homer  of  old,  must  be  poets  as  well  as  musi- 
cians.' 

It  would  be  interesting  to  know  what  the  Poly- 
nesian Homer  sang  when  first  the  white  shad- 
ows appeared  in  the  South  Seas.  Banks  was  not 
sufficiently  interested  to  find  out  and  write  down 
even  the  verses  about  himself,  but  was  content 
to  record  that  the  songs  were  short  and  not  with- 
out rime  and  metre.  Such  songs  are  frequently 
improvisatorial  and  close  to  the  event  or  person 
that  they  celebrate  or  describe.  Had  the  poetry 
been  recorded  for  us,  we  should  have  found  it 
simple  indeed,  and  its  singers  untutored;  but  we 
should  not  have  found  it  easy  to  understand  or 
valuable  as  a  model.  Indeed  it  could  not  have 
been  successfully  imitated,  any  more  than  Dr. 
Burney,  with  all  his  music,  could  have  blown  a 
tune  on  an  Otaheitan  flute.  All  imitation  of 
primitive  verse  is  a  tour  de  force.  It  may  be, 
like  one  of  Chatterton's  Rowley  poems  or  one  of 
Rossetti's  imitations  of  a  popular  ballad,  ex- 
ceedingly beautiful;  but  it  is  a  new  thing  with 
qualities  of  its  own  and  of  its  age.    The  fabrica- 


86  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

tions  of  Macpherson  and  his  disciple  Chatterton 
have  no  doubt  their  own  pecuHar  charm,  but  it 
is  not  the  charm  of  the  centuries  which  they  pro- 
fess, respectively,  to  represent. 

Before  the  movement  had  spent  itself,  there 
arose  a  poet  in  England  who  united  much  of  the 
new  romantic  fashions  of  his  day  with  the  com- 
mon sense,  the  chilly  and  prosaic  sense,  that  had 
long  characterised  the  age.  This  was  William 
Cowper.  He  himself  had  written  a  poem  in 
which  an  ancient  bard  was  represented  as  speak- 
ing to  Queen  Boadicea 

prophetic  words 
Pregnant  with  celestial  fire. 

Bending  as  he  swept  the  chords  " 
Of  his  sweet  but  awful  lyre. 

He  felt  and  gave  poetic  expression  to  the  new 
emotions  about  mankind  and  the  equally  new 
emotions  about  animals.  He  felt  pity  for  poor 
Africans  shut  up  in  the  hold  of  a  slave-trader 
and  pity  for  poor  prisoners  shut  up  in  the  Bas- 
tille. Yet  he  never  really  surrendered  himself  to 
the  ecstasies  of  romanticism,  and  t*ierefore  in  his 
lines  of  farewell  to  Omai,  (for  after  a  year  or 
two,  the  courteous  savage  was  taken  back  to  the 
Society  Islands),  Cowper  displays  that  sanity 
and  that  calmness  which  have  been  so  noticeably 


ANCIENT  BARD  87 

absent  from  all  the  utterances  regarding  primi- 
tivism  which  we  have  studied.  The  lines  are,  like 
much  that  Cowper  wrote,  prim  and  drab,  but  not 
without  a  certain  interest  to  those  who  have  fol- 
lowed Omai's  career.  He  is  speaking — indeed, 
Cowper  is  usually  speaking — of  life  in  the  coun- 
try.^« 

Here  virtue  thrives  as  in  her  proper  soil; 
Not  rude  and  surly  and  beset  with  thorns, 
And  terrible  to  sight  as  when  she  springs 
(If  e'er  she  springs  spontaneous)  in  remote 
And  barbarous  climes,  where  violence  prevails 
And  strength  is  lord  of  all  .  .  . 
War  and  the  chase  engross  the  savage  whole. 

The  man  who  wrote  those  lines  had  not  forgot- 
ten the  search  for  the  golden  age  and  the  inter- 
est in  the  gentle  savage  that  had  characterised 
the  previous  decade.  The  hard  condition  of  the 
life  the  savage  leads  'binds  all  his  faculties,'  and 
this  is  true  of  Esquimau  and  Patagonian  alike. 
And  then  a  sudden  reference  to  the  South  Seas : 

Even  the  favoured  isles 
So  lately  found,  although  the  constant  sun 
Cheer  all  their  seasons  with  a  grateful  smile, 
Can  boast  but  little  virtue. 

Therefore  he  can  but  pity  them,  but  more  than 
all  the  rest  he  pities  Omai: 

16  The  Task,  book  1,  11.  600  flf. 


88  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

Thou  hast  found  again 
Thy  cocoas  and  bananas,  pahns  and  yams, 
And  homestall,  thatched  with  leaves.     But 

hast  thou  found 
Their  former  charms  ?    And  having  seen  our 

state. 
Our  palaces,  our  ladies,  and  our  pomp 
Of  equipage,  our  gardens  and  our  sports. 
And  heard  our  music,  are  thy  simple  friends, 
Thy  simple  fare,  and  all  thy  plain  delights 
As  dear  to  thee  as  once? 

The  poet's  fancy  shows  him  the  savage  climbing 
to  a  mountain-top  to  scan  the  ocean  for  the  sight 
of  an  English  sail: 

Every  speck 
Seen  in  the  dim  horizon,  turns  thee  pale 
With  conflict  of  contending  hopes  and  fears. 
But  comes  at  last  the  dull  and  dusky  eve, 
And  sends  thee  to  thy  cabin  well  prepared 
To  dream  all  night  of  what  the  day  denied. 
Alas!  expect  it  not. 

But  poor  Omai  had  died  long  before^^  Cowper 
wrote  these  verses. 

f     Omai  had  come  to  England  as  an  ideal  savage ; 

he  returned  to  the  South  Seas  a  mere  man.    The 

}o  \  *noble  savage'  was  the  offspring  of  the  rationalism 

of  the  Deist  philosophers,  who,  in  their  attack 

upon  the  Christian  doctrine  of  the  fall  of  man, 

17  It  is  said  that  a  later  navigator  to  the  South  Seas,  who  in- 
quired for  Omai,  learned  that  he  had  died  about  1780. 


ANCIENT  BARD  89 

had  idealised  the  child  of  Nature.  Man  in  a  state 
of  nature,  the  Indian  with  untutored  mind,  was,  J/ 
they  held,  a  noble  creature — indeed,  the  noblest 
work  of  God.  Take  him  untouched  by  the  finger 
of  civilisation,  and  you  would  find  in  him  a  po- 
tential perfection.  Among  his  endowments  there 
must  be  of  course  an  artistic  sense  which  would 
put  to  shame  the  artificialities  of  civilisation. 
Omai,  when  brought  to  this  large  test,  had  proved 
to  be  a  pleasant  person,  but  not  (poor  soul)  the 
ideal  man.  What  the  age  learned  from  its  em- 
pirical test  of  men  in  the  savage  state  was  pre- 
cisely what  every  age  must  learn  about  its  fel- 
lows in  another  stage  of  existence — that  they 
are,  mutatis  mutandis,  very  like  ourselves,  good 
and  bad,  glorious  and  inglorious,  and  that  the 
state  of  perfection  is  placed  before  man  for  his 
inspiration  and  not  as  a  beautiful  dream  of  what 
existed  long^go  or,  perchance,  still  exists  in  some 
unsuspected  isle  of  the  far  seas. 


\ 


IV 

THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT 

Here  and  there  a  cotter's  babe  is  royal  born  by 

right  divine, 

— Tennyson. 

I  read  somewhere,  not  long  ago,  in  an  ill- 
tempered  review  of  a  volume  of  modem  verse,  the 
arresting  assertion  that  America  would  have  a 
poetry  of  its  own,  when  the  stockyards  should 
have  become  lyrical.  What  our  poetry  needs  to 
give  it  life,  this  critic  seemed  to  feel,  was  the 
vigor  of  simplicity,  emancipation  from  the  lit- 
erary tradition,  especially,  it  appeared,  from 
Tennyson  and  the  Victorians.  I  shudder  a  lit- 
tle— doubtless  I  was  meant  to  shudder — at  the 
lyrical  stockyards  and  the  oblation  of  blood  and 
offal  which  this  critic  would  have  us  bring  to  the 
Muse.  His  figure  of  speech  seems  to  me  vigor- 
ous but  unhappy.  Yet  I  flatter  myself  that  I 
can  grasp  his  meaning;  there  is,  when  you  look 
into  it,  nothing  new  in  it.  The  master  workman, 
who  is  also  a  poet,  singing  as  he  labors,  lord  not 
only  of  his  hands  but  of  the  lyre  as  well — ^this 

90 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  91 

figure  has  about  him  a  perennial  fascination. 
Thomas  Gray,  for  example,  had  meditated  upon 
him.  The  poet  is  born,  not  made  by  the  schools ;  >. 
the  darling  of  the  Muse  may  be  the  rude  son  of 
toil.  Accidents  of  course  may  keep  him  silent, 
for  birth  and  fortune  affect  the  minstrel  as  truly 
as  the  warrior,  and  many  a  cotter's  boy  must  have 
squandered  his  genius  while  ploughing  his 
father's  acres ;  many  a  Highland  Girl  must  have 
poured  out  her  voice  to  the  unresponsive  hills 
when  there  was  no  Wordsworth  by  to  catch  its 
passing  loveliness. 

Perhaps  in  this  neglected  spot  is  laid 
Some  heart  once  pregnant  with  celestial 
fire. 
Hands  that  the  rod  of  empire  might  have 
swayed, 
Or  waked  to  ecstasy  the  living  lyre. 

Some  Hampden  or  some  Cromwell,  to  whom  oc- 
casion never  offered  the  one  opportunity  by  which 
he  might  have  issued  into  greatness,  may  be  ly- 
ing in  Stoke  Poges  churchyard,  or  even  some 
mute  inglorious  Milton,  some  inhibited  genius 
whose  fire  smouldered  and  burned  inward  until 
the  divine  spark  finally  died.  But  must  it  al- 
ways be  so?  Might  not  some  one  fetch  us  up  the 
pearl  which  the  dark  unfathomed  caves  of  ocean 
bear?    May  not  the  rustic  Milton  be  sought  out. 


92  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  P:'uAN 

and  wooed  out  of  his  silence,  till  he  is  no  longer 
inglorious  because  he  is  no  longer  mute?  The 
eighteenth  century  has  often  been  charged  with 
chilling  poets  into  silence ;  but,  if  so,  it  was  from 
no  conscious  indifference  to  poetry,  no  unwilling- 
ness to  lend  an  ear  to  young  aspirants.  England 
awaited  the  advent  of  a  poet  with  impatience, 
and  even  sought  for  poetic  genius  in  the  most  un- 
likely places.  It  was  surely  no  fault  of  hers  if 
any  rustic  Milton  remained  mute  and  inglorious 
in  the  eighteenth  century. 

When  Gray  wrote  his  lines  about  the  poet 
whose  lack  of  education  had  prevented  him  from 
releasing  the  fiery  genius  which  resided  in  his 
breast,  some  reminiscence  may  have  crossed  his 
mind  of  the  homespun  and  pathetic  figure  of 
Stephen  Duck.  Throughout  the  century  Duck 
was  the  great  exemplar  of  the  inglorious  Mil- 
tons,  and  the  name  was,  indeed,  specially  applic- 
able to  him,  since  he  attributed  much  of  his  abil- 
ity in  writing  verse  to  the  study  of  Paradise  Lost, 
the  meaning  of  which  he  hammered  out  in  the 
days  of  his  obscurity  with  the  aid  of  a  small  Eng- 
lish Dictionary.  The  career  of  Duck  is  adequate- 
ly recorded  on  the  title-page  of  the  edition  of  his 
poems  as  they  appeared  in  1753: 

The  Beautiful  Works  of  the  Reverend  Mr. 
Stephen  Ducky    {the  Wiltshire  Bard),   Who 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  93 

teas  many  Years  a  poor  Thresher  in  a  Barn  at 
Charleton  in  the  County  of  Wilts^  at  the 
Wages  of  four  Shillings  and  Six-pence  per 
Week,  'till  taken  Notice  of  by  Her  late  Majesty, 
Queen  Caroline;  who,  on  Account  of  his  great 
Genius,  gave  him  an  Apartment  at  Kew,  near 
Richmond,  in  Surry,  and  a  Salary  of  Thirty 
Pounds  PER  Annum;  after  which  he  studied  the 
learned  Languages,  took  Orders,  and  is  now  a 
dignified  Clei^gyman.  'Honest  Duck,'  as  he  was 
called  by  his  contemporaries,  had  a  certain  facil- 
ity in  rhyming,  but  he  acquired  at  once  all  the 
characteristic  vices  of  poetic  style  which  marked 
the  age.  Still,  he  did  have  one  thing  to  say, 
which  perhaps  no  other  could  have  said  with 
equal  sincerity.  The  poet  Crabbe  remembered 
him  for  it  when  he  wrote  The  Village  half  a  cen- 
tury later.  Duck,  soon  after  he  began  to  woo  the 
Muse,  produced  some  verses  entitled  The 
Thresher  s  Labour,  in  which  he  inveighed  against 
the  popular  notion  that  manual  labour  has  a  joy 
and  dignity  all  its  own.  It  has  not.  None  of  the 
trappings  of  j)astoral  poetry  are  really  found  in 
the  country  as  the  peasant  knows  it: 

'Tis  all  a  gloomy,  melancholy  scene. 
Fit  only  to  provoke  the  Muse's  spleen. 

If  Duck  had  any  trace  of  genius — which  I  doubt 
— he  wasted  it  by  attempting  to  acquire  the  airs 


94  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

of  a  courtier  and  live  up  to  the  reputation  which 
Carohne  had  thrust  upon  him.  At  last  his  mind 
gave  way,  and  he  drowned  himself  in  the  Thames. 
Walpole  said  that  Duck  had  not  genius  enough 
to  supply  what  he  had  seemed  to  promise,  and 
was  'only  a  wonder  at  first.'^  He  intimates  that 
his  example  was  pernicious,  since,  as  a  result  of 
it,  'twenty  artisans  and  labourers  turned  poets 
and  starved.'  One  of  these  was  Mary  Collier, 
the  Poetical  Washerwoman  of  Peterfield,  who, 
in  1739,  printed  a  poem  entitled  The  Woman's 
Labour,^  Mary's  poem,  with  some  additions, 
was  reprinted  in  1762,  with  a  short  preface  in 
which  she  gave  a  melancholy  sketch  of  her  life. 
Her  instinctive  gloom  is  no  doubt  explained  by 
the  fact  that  she  read  Josephus  in  her  youth  and 
Duck  in  her  maturity.  The  poem  called  The 
Woman  s  Labour  was  addressed  to  Duck,  and 
was  a  spirited  protest  against  the  thresher's  slight 
estimate  of  female  toil.  The  following  lines, 
which  sum  up  what  she  has  to  say,  are  based  on 
corresponding  lines  at  the  close  of  Duck's  poem: 

While  you  to  Sysiphus  [^sic']  yourselves  com- 
pare, 

With  Danaus'  Daughters  we  may  claim  a 
Share ; 

1  To  Hannah  More,  November  13,  1784. 

-  There  is  a  copy  of  this  rare  pamphlet  in  the  Yale  Library. 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  95 

For  while  he  labours  hard  against  the  Hill, 
Bottomless  Tubs  of  Water  they  must  fill. 

Perhaps  with  some  hope  of  rivaling  Duck's 
career,  poor  Mary  addressed  verses  to  young 
King  George;  but  neither  king  nor  fortune 
smiled  upon  her.  At  the  end  of  her  account  of 
herself,  she  says: 

'Now  I  have  retn^ed  to  a  Garret  (The  Poor 
Poet's  Fate)  in  Alton,  where  I  am  endeavouring 
to  pass  the  Relict  of  my  days  in  Piety,  Purity, 
Peace,  and  an  Old  Maid.' 

The  fame  of  Duck  the  Poetical  Thresher  was 
for  a  time  eclipsed  by  that  of  Henry  Jones,  the 
Poetical  Bricklayer.  He  was  perhaps  the  only 
one  of  the  inglorious  Miltons  who  achieved,  for 
a  time,  a  measure  of  metropolitan  popularity. 
Jones  was  an  Irishman,  of  some  slight  education, 
who  made  verses  while  he  laid  bricks.  He  hap- 
pened to  be  employed  in  Dublin  when  Chester- 
field arrived  there  as  Lord  Lieutenant  of  Ire- 
land. To  him  the  bricklayer  addressed  a  poem, 
On  his  Eoccellency  the  Earl  of  Chesterfield's  Ar- 
rival in  Irelaridj  which,  by  great  good  fortune, 
came  into  the  peer's  hands,  and  was  read  by  him. 
He  at  once  took  Jones  under  his  patronage,  and 
when  he  left  Ireland,  after  a  brief  term  in  office, 
advised  Jones  to  follow  him  to  England.     The 


96  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

advice  pleased  the  poet — bricklayer  no  longer — 
and  he  had  thereafter,  in  England,  a  seat  at 
Chesterfield's  table  whenever  he  cared  to  claim  it. 
Jones  revised  the  old  play,  The  Earl  of  Essex, 
and  produced  what  is  in  fact  a  new  tragedy — 
at  least  it  has  always  ranked  as  his  own. 

In  a  letter  to  the  Baron  of  Kreuningen,  writ- 
ten in  the  spring  of  1753,  Chesterfield  speaks 
with  some  enthusiasm  of  Jones  as  'un  poete  j'ai 
\^sic~\  deterre  a  Dublin,  qui  etait  ma^on  et  qui  ne 
savoit  pas  un  seul  mot  de  Grec  ou  de  Latin,  mais 
a  qui  Dieu  seul  avait  donne  un  genie  veritable- 
ment  poetique.  Je  crois  que  la  poesie  vous  plaira.' 
The  Earl  of  Esseoc  was  produced  with  success, 
was  several  times  revived,  and  at  last  found  a 
place  in  Bell's  British  Theatre.  But  success  was 
too  much  for  poor  Jones.  The  strain  of  asso- 
ciation with  gentlemen,  who  expected  him  'to 
keep  up  the  dignity  of  a  poet,  was  so  great  that 
he  sought  relief  in  lower  company.  He  took  to 
drink,  and  wasted  his  money.  He  lost  the  favour 
of  Chesterfield  by  borrowing  from  one  of  his 
flunkeys.  He  languished  in  spunging  houses, 
where  many  stories  were  told  of  his  ingenuity  in 
escaping  from  the  fangs  of  the  bailiffs.  On  one 
occasion  he  is  said  to  have  won  the  favour  of  a 
bailiff's  daughter  by  an  apt  poem  on  her  beauty ; 
whereupon  she  incontinently,  like  Lucy  in  the 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  97 

Beggar  s  Opera,  set  her  lover  at  liberty.  At  the 
age  of  fifty  Jones  was  run  over  in  Saint  Mar- 
tin's Lane,  while  in  a  state  of  drunkenness,  and 
was  very  dreadfully  injured.  He  died  a  few 
days  later  in  the  parish  workhouse.  He  left  be- 
hind him  a  score  of  different  publications,  some 
of  which  had  passed  through  many  editions,  but 
all  of  which,  except  the  Earl  of  Essex,  were  in- 
stantly forgotten  when  the  novelty  of  a  brick- 
layer turning  poet  had  worn  itself  out. 

The  misery  in  which  these  poets  ended,  was 
escaped  by  James  Woodhouse,  the  Poetical  Shoe- 
maker. When  a  young  man,  Woodhouse 
brought  himself  to  attention  by  an  ode  addressed 
to  the  poet  Shenstone,  who  undertook  the  now 
familiar  task  of  introducing  another  peasant- 
poet  to  the  world  of  readers.  In  the  course  of 
this  initial  contact  with  fine  society,  Woodhouse 
became  the  humble  instrument  by  which  two  fa- 
mous friends  were  first  brought  together.  Mrs. 
Thrale  tells  us  that  Samuel  Johnson  was  first  in- 
vited to  her  house  for  the  purpose  of  meeting 
Woodhouse,  about  whom  everybody  was  talking. 
It  was  Woodhouse  whom  Johnson  advised  (the 
advice  is  repeated  in  the  Lives  of  the  Poets) 
to  give  his  days  and  nights  to  Addison.  But 
Johnson  did  not  share  the  general  conviction 
that  Woodhouse  was  a  poet.     He  described  the 


98  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

public  interest  as  being  'all  vanity  and  childish- 
ness' :  'They  had  better,'  Johnson  told  Dr.  Max- 
well, 'furnish  the  man  with  good  implements  for 
his  trade  than  raise  subscriptions  for  his  poems. 
He  may  make  an  excellent  shoemaker,  but  can 
never  make  a  good  poet.'^ 

I  cannot  see  that  Woodhouse's  verses  are  visi- 
bly better  than  those  of  his  predecessors,  al- 
though his  productive  period  lasted  somewhat 
longer  and  his  complete  works  have  been  re- 
printed in  our  own  day.  His  long-winded  poems 
are  full  of  the  same  classicism  that  all  these  hum- 
ble minstrels  thought  it  compulsory  to  assume. 
He,  too,  delights  in  verse-epistles  to  the  Great. 
The  'obsequious  Muse'  addresses  the  'judicious 
Shenstone'  or  classic  Lyttelton,  or  even  soars  to 
the  glorious  contemplation  of  Royalty  itself. 
With  all  their  paraded  humility  these  homespun 
singers  seldom  write  of  the  people  and  the  life 
they  know,  but  exhaust  themselves  in  the  attempt 
to  become  worthy  to  associate — though  always 
deferentially — with  the  wits  and  bluestockings  of 
London.  Says  Woodhouse  in  reference  to  the 
life  which  he  would  choose,  were  it  in  his  power 
to  choose: 

3  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson,  Hill's  ed.,  vol.  2,  p.  127.  The  edi- 
tor of  the  complete  edition  of  Woodhouse's  Works  (London, 
1896),  says  that  Johnson  later  modified  this  judgment;  but  of 
this  there  is  no  evidence. 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  99 

Nor  should  my  table  smoak  with  dainty  meats, 
But  clean  and  wholesome  be  my  cheerful 

treats ; 
With  faithful  friends  encircled  there  I'd  sit, 
To  scan  with  judgment  works  of  taste  and 

wit.* 

But  despite  such  ambitions,  Woodhouse  had  the 
sense,  if  not  to  stick  to  his  last,  at  any  rate  to 
continue  at  some  kind  of  labour.  He  advertised 
to  the  world,  in  the  preface  to  his  first  collection 
of  verses,  his  devotion  to  industry:  *He  gener- 
ally sits  at  his  work  with  a  pen  and  ink  by  him, 
and  when  he  has  made  a  couplet,  he  writes  them 
down  on  his  knee,  so  that  he  may  not  thereby  ne- 
glect the  duties  of  a  good  husband  and  kind 
father.'^  Woodhouse  was  afterwards  steward  to 
Mrs.  Elizabeth  Montagu,  who  disapproved  of 
certain  of  his  political  and  religious  views.  Who 
would  desire  the  services  of  a  steward  with 
Views'?  Thereafter  he  supported  himself  by 
keeping  a  little  shop,  and  died  at  the  age  of 
eighty-five,  having  long  since  outlived  his  fame. 

But  though  the  bluestockings  cared  little  for 
the  poetical  shoemaker,  they  were  confident 
enough  regarding  their  own  great  discovery,  the 
Poetical  Milk-woman  of  Bristol. 

*  The  Leasowes,  a  poem. 

5  Clearly  this  was  written  before  Woodhouse  had  begun  to  de- 
vote his  days  and  nights  to  Addison. 


100  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

In  1783  Hannah  More  discovered  that  Ann 
Yearsley,  the  milk-woman^  who  called  daily  at 
her  house  in  Bristol  for  kitchen  refuse  with  which 
to  feed  her  pig,  was  accustomed  to  employ  her 
leisure  moments  in  the  composition  of  verses. 
She  at  once  took  the  woman  in  charge,  taught 
her  spelling  and  the  simplest  'rules'  of  rhetoric, 
and  after  a  lapse  of  some  months  felt  that  her 
pupil  had  made  such  progress  that  she  might 
safely  submit  her  verses  to  bluestocking  judg- 
ment. The  enthusiasm  with  which  Mrs.  Montagu 
and  her  friends  received  them  is  significant  both 
of  their  eagerness  to  assist  the  development  of 
poetry  and  of  their  unfitness  for  the  task.  Mrs. 
Montagu  had  made  nothing  of  the  poetical  shoe- 
maker, but  a  female  Chatterton — from  Bristol, 
too — made  more  appeal.  She  wrote  to  Miss 
More: 

*Let  me  come  to  the  wondrous  story  of  the 
milk-woman.  Indeed  she  is  one  of  Nature's 
miracles.  What  force  of  imagination!  What 
harmony  of  numbers !  In  Pagan  times  one  could 
have  supposed  Apollo  had  fallen  in  love  with  her 
rosy  cheek,  snatched  her  to  the  top  of  Mt.  Par- 
nassus, given  her  a  glass  of  his  best  Helicon  to 

6  I  have  taken  my  account  of  Mrs.  Yearsley  from  my  Salon  and 
English  Letters,  from  which  the  Macmillan  Company  courteously 
permit  me  to  quote. 


.    ..•.«•    . . 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  101 

drink,  and  ordered  the  nine  Muses  to  attend 
her  call.' 

This  hypothesis  is  unsuitable  to  a  Christian 
age,  and  so  Mrs.  Montagu  suggests  that  the 
Scriptures,  the  Psalms  and  the  Book  of  Job  in 
particular,  may  have  taught  the  artless  numbers 
to  flow;  whereupon  she  herself  indulges  in  a 
flight:  ■  r  1^ 

' Avaunt !  grammarians ;  stand  away !  logicians ; 
far,  far  away  all  heathen  ethics  and  mythology, 
geometry  and  algebra,  and  make  room  for  the 
Bible  and  Milton  when  a  poet  is  to  be  made. 
The  proud  philosopher  ends  far  short  of  what 
has  been  revealed  to  the  simple  in  our  religion. 
Wonder  not,  therefore,  if  our  humble  dame  rises 
above  Pindar,  or  steps  beyond  Aeschylus.'^ 

JVIrs.  Montagu  joyfully  promises  her  support. 

The  rest  of  the  Blues  were  hardly  less  enthusi- 
astic. Old  Mrs.  Delany  circulated  the  milk- 
woman's  proposals  to  print ;  Mrs.  Boscawen  sent 
in  a  'handsome  list  of  subscribers';  the  Duchess 
of  Beaufort  requested  a  visit  from  Mrs.  Years- 
ley;  the  Duchess  of  Portland  sent  a  twenty- 
pound  bank-note.  Walpole  gave  her  money  and 
the  works  of  Hannah  More.  The  Duchess  of 
Devonshire  presented  her  with  an  edition  of  the 
English  Poets.     All  social  London  and  half  lit- 

7  Roberts's  Memoirs  of  Hannah  More,  vol.  1,  p.  363 ;  1784.. 


102  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

erary  London  put  its  name  on  the  list  of  sub- 
scribers. When,  in  1785,  the  volume  appeared, 
it  was  prefaced  by  a  letter  from  Hannah  More 
to  Mrs.  Montagu,  telling  Mrs.  Yearsley's  story 
and  recommending  her  to  the  good  attentions  of 
the  Queen  of  the  Bluestockings,  whose  delight 
*in  protecting  real  genius'  is  well  known.  Mrs. 
Montagu's  name  was  indeed  writ  large  in  the 
volume.  In  the  address  To  Stella — Stella  being 
the  milk- woman's  name  for  Hannah  More — Mrs. 
Montagu  is  referred  to  as 

That  bright  fair  who  decks  a  Shakespeare's  urn 
With  deathless  glories. 

Similar  adulation  is  diffused  through  some  sev- 
enty lines  of  a  blank  verse  poem,  On  Mrs,  Mon- 
tagu, Mrs.  Yearsley,  like  the  other  lyrical  la- 
bourers, was  not  loth  to  address  the  Great  in 
verse.  Mr.  Raikes  of  Manchester,  the  founder  of 
Sunday  Schools,  the  Duchess  of  Portland,  and 
the  author  of  The  Cattle  of  Otranto  (deferenti- 
ally referred  to  as  *the  Honourable  H  e 

W e')  were  all  commemorated.  Their  in- 
fluential patronage  and  sad  Lactilla's  melancholy 
tale  made  the  book  an  immediate  success,  so  that 
it  passed  into  a  fourth  edition  in  1786. 

Lactilla  might,  however,  have  been  happier, 
had  she  been  less  successful.    There  had  come  to 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  103 

her,  after  the  publication  of  her  book,  the  not  in- 
considerable sum  of  c£350,  which  Hannah  More 
held  in  trust  for  her.  One  is  not  surprised  to 
learn  that  Miss  More  was  cautious  in  paying  out 
this  money  to  Mrs.  Yearsley,  nor  that  this  caution 
impressed  the  owner  of  the  money  as  mere  nig- 
gardliness. A  sharp  quarrel  ensued,  which  was 
fully  aired  by  both  women — by  Hannah  More  in 
her  letters  to  Mrs.  Montagu  and  by  the  poetess 
in  her  preface  to  her  next  volume  of  verses.  It 
cost  the  poor  milk- woman  all  her  fine  friends  and 
the  fine  reputation  which  they  had  blown  up  for 
her.  She  sank  gradually  from  view,  and  when 
she  died  in  1806,  was  probably  as  obscure  as  when 
she  was  'discovered'  some  twenty  years  before. 
Had  she  been  of  a  philosophical  temper,  she 
might  perhaps  have  extracted  some  comfort  from 
the  cjrnical  reflection  that  her  fall  had  been  well- 
nigh  as  humiliating  to  her  discoverers  and  pat- 
rons as  to  herself.  Walpole  chuckled  for  months 
over  the  collapse  of  her  reputation,  asserting 
that,  if  wise,  she  would  now  put  gin  in  her  milk, 
and  kill  herself  by  way  of  attaining  to  an  immor- 
tality like  Chatterton's ;  but  the  bluestockings 
were  glad  to  forget  the  poor  creature  and  the 
mischief  they  had  done  her,  and  the  pathos  of  her 
latter  state  moved  them  only  to  passionate  de- 
scriptions of  her  ingratitude. 


104  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

And  then,  suddenly,  near  the  close  of  the  cen- 
tury, without  warning  and  without  the  patron- 
age of  the  great,  the  gift  was  bestowed.  Eng- 
land had  sought  for  its  peasant-poet  with  the  pa- 
tience of  Job.  And  suddenly  the  Lord  answered 
Job  out  of  the  whirlwind,  and  the  voice  of  God 
was  that  of  the  ploughman  of  Ayrshire.  In  Rob- 
ert Burns  the  labourer  became  not  merely  vocal 
but  lyrical.  He  had  the  divine  fire  for  which 
Gray  had  longed  and  a  Satanic  pride  which  kept 
him  from  licking  the  boots  of  his  patrons.  The 
fine  friends  which  the  Kilmarnock  edition  of  1786 
made  for  him  in  Edinburgh — bluestockings  and 
professors — tried  their  best  to  spoil  him  by  mak- 
ing him  over  into  a  Thomson  or  a  Beattie.  He 
was  expected  to  be  obsequious,,  to  emulate  the 
Irish  Jones  or  the  English  Woodhouse.  But  his 
well-wishers  could  not  harness  the  whirlwind. 
Soaring  at  a  single  bound  above  the  mute  and  the 
inglorious,  he  took  at  once  and  with  ease  that 
consummate  position  in  the  literature  which  he 
has  held  ever  since. 

I  What  does  the  career  of  Burns  show  us  about 
I  the  movement  we  have  been  studying  and  its 
r  I  search  for  a  new  art  and  a  rejuvenated  poetry? 
I  For  *the  new  poetry'  all  who  care  for  literature 
must  be,  in  all  ages,  constantly  in  search.  What 
the  advent  of  Burns  showed  in  1786  was  that 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  105 

such  an  art  nouveau  could  come  into  existence  , 
without  any  contemptuous  spirit  of  contradiction 
or  rejection.  For  one  thing,  Burns's  career 
shows  us  that  force  or  passion  or  genius — call  it 
what  you  will — is  not  destroyed  or  even  imper-  ! 
illed  by  education.  Burns,  though  not  highly,  ' 
was  respectably  well  educated.  Like  many  an- 
other Scots  peasant,  he  wanted  and  he  got  all  the 
education  he  could  come  at.  He  knew  and  said 
that  learning  could  not  make  a  poet,  but  never, 
so  far  as  I  have  noticed,  is  there  a  hint  that  such 
education  is  in  any  way  silencing  or  restraining 
him  as  he  sings  of  his  rustic  loves  and  his  rustic 
hatreds.  He  never  says  that  he  was  a  better  poet 
when  he  was  ignorant,  or  praised  others  merely 
because  they  were  'untutored,'  and  therefore  gen- 
uine. 

Moreover,  the  literary  tradition  was  in  no  sense 
repressive  to  Burns.  His  most  popular  poems  (^ 
have  their  sources  in  the  poetry  of  his  immediate 
predecessors.  'Burns,'  says  Dr.  Neilson,  'belongs 
to  the  literary  history  of  Britain  as  a  legitimate 
descendant  of  easily-traced  ancestors.'  The  in- 
fluence of  the  popular  song  of  Scotland,  of  Ram- 
say, and  of  Fergusson,  has  been  repeatedly  stud- 
ied and  fully  stated ;  but  his  indebtedness  to  Eng- 
lish literature  has  been  more  grudgingly  admit- 
ted.    Yet  the  plain  fact  is  that  his  work  teems 


106  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

with  references  to  his  English  contemporaries 
and  their  forerunners.  It  is  not  rash  to  say  that 
his  acquaintance  with  the  hterature  of  his  cen- 
tury was  thorough.  He  had  drunk  deep  of  the 
poetry  of  Pope,  Young,  Robert  Blair,  Collins, 
Gray,  Shenstone,  Thomson,  Beattie,  and  Gold- 
smith, and  the  influence  of  most  of  them  is  plain- 
ly discernible  in  his  first  volume..  He  was  an 
ardent  believer  in  Ossian,  whom  he  called  'prince 
of  poets.'  Two  years  after  the  appearance  of 
The  Tosh  he  was  reading  Cowper  with  delight.® 
He  proclaimed  Goldsmith  his  favourite  poet,  and 
drew  a  line  from  The  Deserted  Villege  to  serve 
as  the  conclusion  of  the  epitaph  which  he  en- 
graved upon  his  father's  tomb.  Goldsmith  was 
reigning  over  the  poet's  mind  when  he  wrote,  in 
the  Cotter's  Saturday  Night,  of  the 

youthful,  loving  modest  pair 
[Who]  in  other's  arms  breathe  out  the 
tender  tale 
Beneath  the  milk-white  thorn  that  scents  the 
ev'ning  gale. 

What  language,  pray,  is  this  ?  And  whose  is  this 
imagery?    Is  there  no  hint  in  it  of  the  style  of  the 

8  Those  who  wish  to  examine  farther  into  Burns's  indebtedness 
to  his  predecessors  may  consult  Heinrich  Molenaar's  Robert 
Burns'  Beziehungen  zur  Litteratur,  Erlangen,  1899,  Worthless 
as  a  general  treatment  of  the  subject,  lacking  even  an  adequate 
conception  of  the  problems  involved,  the  book  contains,  never- 
theless, a  great  deal  of  valuable  evidence. 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  107 

Deserted  Village,  and  its  ^pastoral'  background, 
prominent  in  which  is  the  ^hawthorn  bush  for 
whisp'ring  lovers  made'?  Burns  took  as  a  text 
for  the  Cotter's  Saturday  Night  one  of  the  most 
famous  passages  in  Gray's  Elegy.  And  the  low- 
ing herd,  in  the  opening  stanzas  of  the  poem 
itself,  the  weary  plowman  plodding  his  home- 
ward way  at  evening,  the  children  who  run  to 
lisp  their  sire's  return,  the  blazing  hearth,  and 
the  busy  housewife — whence  are  all  these? 

Bums  loved  the  fiction  of  his  century  no  less 
warmly  than  its  poetry.  With  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  The  Castle  of  Otranto  and  the  works 
of  Miss  Burney,  he  had  read  every  novel  of  the 
period  that  can  be  said  to  have  had  any  marked 
influence  in  the  development  of  fiction.  After 
reading  Zeluco,  he  wrote  to  its  author.  Dr. 
Moore, 

I  have  gravely  planned  a  comparative  view  of 
you,  Fielding,  Richardson  and  Smollet  [sic]  in 
your  different  qualities  and  merits  as  novel- 
writers. 

He  sketches  the  outlines  of  this  essay  a  few 
weeks  later.  The  author  of  Zeluco  is  compared 
with  Fielding,  whom  Burns  apparently  regarded 
as  the  supreme  novelist  of  the  age.  Richardson 
he  held  to  be  distinctly  inferior  to  Fielding  in 
truth  to  human  nature,  and  his  characters,  as  it 


108  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

were,  *beings  from  another  sphere.'  It  is  remark- 
able that  the  sentimental  passages  did  not  please 
him,  but  the  truth  is  that  Burns's  taste  called  for 
sentimentalism  of  a  more  pungent  flavour. 
His  favourite  sentimentalists  were  Sterne  and 
Mackenzie.  Mackenzie  was,  he  said,  the  'first  of 
men';  but  he  found  a  richer  nature  and  a  better 
source  for  imitation  in  the  tears  and  flirtations 
of  Yorick  Sterne.  He  couples  Tristram  Shandy 
and  the  Man  of  Feeling  as  his  'bosom  favourites.' 
David  Sillar,  in  his  reminiscences  of  the  poet, 
records  a  truly  sentimental  scene,  in  which  we 
detect  at  once  the  lackadaisical  and  self-conscious 
emotionalism  of  Yorick  rather  than  the  genuine, 
though  feeble,  tenderness  of  Mackenzie: 

In  one  of  my  visits  to  Lochlie  in  time  of  a 
sowen  supper,  he  was  so  intent  on  reading,  I 
think,  Tristram  Shandy,  that,  his  spoon  falling 
out  of  his  hand,  made  him  exclaim,  in  a  tone 
scarcely  imitable,  'Alas,  poor  Yorick' ! 

It  was  not  in  Burns  to  catch  Yorick's  playful 
and  amused  observation  of  his  own  extrava- 
gances. Burns's  passions  ran  too  deep  to  beget 
the  froth  and  flummery  that  fill  even  the  most 
delightful  pages  of  Tristram  and  the  Sentimental 
Journey;  but,  for  all  that  he  had  a  try  at  the  col- 
loquial manner  and  the  broken -backed  humour 
of  Shandyism: 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  109 

'The  clock,'  he  writes  to  Archibald  Lawrie,  'is 
just  striking,  one,  two,  three,  four,  — ,  — , — , — , 
— ,  — ,  — ,  twelve  forenoon ;  and  here  I  sit,  in  the 
attic  story,  alias  the  garret,  with  a  friend  on  the 
right  of  m}^  standish — a  friend  whose  kindness  I 
shall  experience  at  the  close  of  this  line — there — 
thank  you — a  friend,  my  dear  Mr.  Lawrie,  whose 
kindness  often  makes  me  blush.  ...  I  have  so 
high  a  veneration,  or  rather  idolatorisation  of  the 
cleric  character,  that  even  a  little  futurum  esse 
vel  fuisse  Priestling  in  his  Penna,  pennae,  pen- 
nae,  &c.,  throws  an  awe  over  my  mind  in  his 
presence,  and  shortens  my  sentences  into  single 
ideas.' 

It  seems  odd  that  more  has  not  been  made  of 
Sterne's  influence  upon  Burns,  for  it  is  not  mere- 
\y  a  matter  of  occasional  stylistic  imitation. 
Burns  emulated  Sterne's  philandering,  too.^ 
Sterne's  career  gave,  as  it  were,  the  sanction  of 
the  genteel  and  literary  world  to  a  state  of  di- 
vided allegiance  into  which  Burns's  wayward 
emotions  had  already  plunged  him,  and  made  his 
Clarinda  seem  to  him  the  Scottish  counterpart 
of  Sterne's  Eliza. 

As  Burns  responded  to  the  fashions  and 
trusted  the  literary  traditions  of  his  day,  so  he 
was  content  with  the  technique  of  verse  as  he 
learned  it  from  his  Scotch  and  English  prede- 

9  He  himself  compared  Jean  Lorimer  to  Eliza  Draper. 


110  NATURE'S  SIMPLE  PLAN 

cessors.  He  invented  no  new  manner  of  speech. 
He  did  not  feel,  as  it  were,  the  necessity  of  dis- 
carding the  diatonic  scale.  He  did  not  write 
prose  and  call  it  verse;  he  did  not  even  use  the 
'loose  numbers,'  which  had  been  so  generally  ex- 
pected, though  his  songs  were  indeed  wildly 
sweet.  He  himself  has  told  us  of  the  labour 
which  he  expended  upon  a  song,  until  by  contin- 
ual polishing  he  brought  it  to  that  finished  state 
which  his  instinct  demanded.  Like  a  true  artist, 
he  loved  his  technique,  and,  without  pursuing  it 
as  an  end  in  itself,  yet  gladly  underwent  the  dis- 
cipline of  it  all,  rejoicing  as  a  strong  man  to  run 
his  race.  *There  is  no  such  thing,'  said  Swin- 
burne, 'as  a  dumb  poet  or  a  handless  painter. 
The  essence  of  an  artist  is  that  he  should  be  ar- 
ticulate.' To  adopt  for  a  moment  the  figure  of 
speech  beloved  in  the  eighteenth  century,  we  may 
say  that  Burns  caught  the  lyre  from  the  hands 
of  his  forerunners.  He  did  not  fling  it  aside,  and 
fashion  an  instrument  that  should  be  all  his  own, 
but  seized  and  mastered  it.  Thus  was  to  be  ful- 
filled the  dream  which  Gray  had  dreamed  of  an 
inspired  peasant  who  should  wake  to  ecstasy  the 
living  lyre. 

I  have  no  desire  to  leave  with  you  the  impres- 
sion that  I  consider  art  to  be  mere  tradition, 
without  capacity  for  expansion,  or  indeed  for 


THE  INSPIRED  PEASANT  111 

new  and  amazing  manifestations.  Least  of  all 
do  I  wish  to  give  the  impression  that  Robert 
Burns  walked  dutifully  in  the  path  marked  out 
by  the  multitude  who  had  preceded  him.  But  it 
has  seemed  to  me  useful,  perhaps  even  oppor- 
tune, to  reassert  the  truth  that  art,  in  its  uni- 
versal response  to  human  needs,  has  the  power 
of  focussing  and  carrying  on  what  is  best  in  the 
past.  It  may  and  does  gain  by  reaction;  but  it 
is  not  its  normal  state  to  be  consciously  or  for 
ever  in  revolt,  to  be  ever  repudiating  the  work  of 
its  rude  forefathers,  or  to  be  constantly  scatter- 
ing what  has  been  gathered  in  the  past. 


INDEX 

Addison,  Joseph,  Cato,  3;  mentioned,  97,  99n. 

Aikiu,  Miss,  56;  and  see  Barbauld. 

Allieri,    Vittorio,   42. 

America,  poetry  in,  90. 

Arne,  Thomas  A.,  68. 

Attuiock,   Esquimau,   25,   26,   28. 

Banks,  Sir  Joseph,   14,  79,  80,  84,  85. 

Barbauld,  Mrs.  Anna  Letitia,  38,  39,  56. 

Baretti,  Giuseppe,  78. 

Bartolozzi,  Prancesco,  76. 

Baubacis,  the,  15. 

Beattie,  James,  104,  106. 

Beaufort,  Duchess  of,  101 

Behn,  Aphra,  OroonoJco,  74. 

Beyle,  Marie  Henri.     See  Stendhal. 

Blair,  Robert,  106. 

Blake,  William,  59. 

Boscawen,  Mrs.,  101. 

Boswell,  James,  EypochondriacTc,  24;  and  the  Esquimaux,  25,  26; 
visits  Corsica,  46-48;  Account  of  Corsica,  46,  51;  and  Paoli, 
47,  48,  49-54;  his  efforts  to  aid  Corsica,  49;  in  Corsican  garb, 
49-51,  51  n.;  mentioned,  1,  2,  12,  38,  42,  56,  57,  77. 

British  Essays  in  Favour  of  the  Brave  Corsicans,  51,  52. 

Bruce,  James,  5,  6,  16. 

Burnaby,  Andrew,  Journal  of  a  Tour  to  Corsica,  42,  45,  46;  men- 
tioned 36n. 

Burnet,  James,  Lord  Monboddo.     See  Monboddo. 

Burney,  Fanny,  on  Omai,  81,83;  mentioned,  47,  107. 

Burney,  James,  79,  81,  83,  85. 

Burns,  Robert,  104  j^. 

Buttafuoco,  M.,  Corsican,  34,  35,  44. 

Byron,  George  Gordon,  Lord,  The  Island,  9  n.,  10  n. ;  Manfred,  68 ; 
mentioned,   31. 

Byron,  John,  5,   6. 

Caroline,  Queen,  93,  94. 

Cartwright,  George,  brings  Esquimaux  to  London,  25;  mentioned, 

5,    6. 
Caubvick,  Esquimau,  25,  27,  29. 

113 


114  INDEX 

Chatham,  Lord,  50. 

Chatterton,   Thomas,  ''Eowley"   poems,   85,   86;    mentioned,   103, 

Chesterfield,  Lord,  Letters,  quoted,  58;  and  Henry  Jones,  95,  96; 

mentioned,  38. 
Civilisation,   decline  of,  in  England,   Goldsmith,  on,  3,  4;    Mon- 

boddo  on,  19  ff.;  renunciation  of,  31;  and  the  noble  savage,  89. 
Collier,   Mary,  the   ''Poetical   Washerwoman,"    94,   95. 
Collins,  William,  106. 
Colman,  George,  26,  66. 

Colman,  George,  the  younger,  Eandom  Becollections,  quoted,  79,  81. 
Cook,  James,  6,  8. 
Corsica,  Eousseau  quoted  on,  33,  34;  Eousseau's  incomplete  scheme 

of  government  for,  34  j^.;  poverty  of,  36;  Stendhal  in,  38;  in 

rebellion  against  Genoa,  41;    Mrs.   Macaulay's  pamphlet  on, 

43,  44 ;  Boswell  's  visit  to,  46  ff. ;  his  efforts  in  cause  of,  49  ff. ; 

occupied  by  French,  47,  52 ;  England  refuses  to  aid,  51,  52 ; 

ceded  to  France  by  Genoa,  53,  54,  55;  effect  of  her  failure  to 

win  independence,   55,   56,   59. 
Corsica,  a  Poetical  Address,  39,  53,  54. 
Cowper,   William,   character   of   his  poetry,   86,   87;    his   farewell 

to  Omai,  86-88;  mentioned,  59,  106. 
Crabbe,  George,  59,  93. 
Cullum,  Sir  Joseph,  80  n. 

Dance,  Nathaniel,  his  portrait  by  Omai,  76. 

Darwin,  Charles,  Descent  of  Man,  17. 

Delany,  Mary  G.,  101. 

Devonshire,  Duchess  of,  101. 

Dick,  Sir  Alexander,  52  n. 

Draper,  Eliza,  109  and  n. 

Duck,  Stephen,  the  ''Poetical  Thresher,"   92-94. 

Esquimaux,  brought  to  England  by  Cartwright,  6,  25  ff.     And  see 

Attuiock,  Caubvick. 
Evans,  Evan,  the  Ancient  Welsh  Bards,  72. 

Fergusson,  Eobert,  105. 

Fielding,  Henry,  107. 

Florio,  John,  73  n. 

Frederick  the  Great,  Anti-Machiavel,  34;  mentioned,  53. 

Freedom,  personal,  and  authority,  33.     And  see  Liberty. 

French   Eevolution,    59,   60. 

Friendly  Islands,  8. 

Furneaux,  Tobias,  brings  Omai  to  England,  8,  75;  mentioned,  5. 

Genoa,  cedes  Corsica  to  France,  53. 

Gentleman 's  Magazine,  letter  of  Boswell  to,  51  n. 


INDEX  115 

George  III,  4,  26,  54,  59,  78,  94. 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  on  luxury,  2,  3,  4;  The  Deserted  Village,  3,  106, 

107;   History  of  the  Earth  and  Animated  Nature,  18  n.,  21, 

29,  30  and  n.;  mentioned,  1,  21. 
Gray,  Thomas,  character  of,  and  of  his  poetry,  61  j!^.;  the  Elegy, 

61,    62,   91,    107;    the   Progress   of  Poesy,    63-65;    Essay    oii 

Lydgate,  63^1.;  the  Bard,  65,  66,  67,  72,  73,  84;   mentioned, 

68,  69,  70,  71,  91,  92,  104,  106,  110. 

Hawkesworth,  Dr.  John,  OroonoTco,  74,  75, 
HeroicJc  Epistle,  An,  from  Omiah,  etc.,  17. 
Holland,  Lord,  54. 

Ireland,  Boswell  in,  51. 

Johnson,  Samuel,  on  luxury,  2,  4;    on  Omai,  77,  78;    mentioned, 

1,  19  and  w.,  24,  43,  57,  97,  98  and  n. 
Jones,   Henry,  the   ^'Poetical   Bricklayer,"   95-97;    The   Earl   of 

Essex,  96;    mentioned,   104. 

Kreuningen,  Baron  of,  96. 

La  Condamine,  M.  de,  7. 

Lactilla.     See  Yearsley,  Ann. 

Le  Blanc,  Mile,  the  Savage  Girl,  6,  7,  8,  14. 

Le  Vasseur,  Therese,  35. 

Liberty,   and   Poetry,   64,    65, 

Lloyd,  Kobert,  66. 

London,  Esquimaux  in,  25  ff. ;   Omai  in,  8,  27,  28,  75  ff . 

Longfellow,   Henry  W.,   31. 

Lope  de  Vega,  El  Nuevo  Mwido,  73  n. 

Lorimer,  Jean,  109  n. 

Luxury,  the  menace  of,  1  ff. 

Lyttelton,  George,  Baron,  98. 

Macaulay,  Catharine,  advises  Paoli  concerning  government  of 
Corsica,  43,  44. 

Mackenzie,   Henry,   The  Man  of  Feeling,  108. 

Macpherson,  James,  author  of  the  Ossianic  poems,  71,  72;  Fingal, 
71;   Temora,  72;  mentioned,  86. 

Mason,  William,  Caractacus,  66,  70,  71;  mentioned,  84. 

Maxwell,   Dr.,       98. 

Milton,  John,  Paradise  Lost,  91. 

Model  Nation,  necessary  elements  of,  33. 

Monboddo,  Lord,  and  Mile.  Le  Blanc,  7,  8;  Origin  and  Progress 
of  Languuge,  10,  11,  12  n.,  15,  16  and  ».;  18,  20,  21;  nistory 
of  the  Wild  Girl,  12  n.,  the  * '  Scottish  Eousseau, "  12 ;  his 
chief  claim  to  remembrance,  13;  Ancient  Metaphysics,  13,  18; 


116  INDEX 

his  character  and  opinions  considered,  13  j^.;  believes  in 
existence  of  men  with  tails,  15  j^.;  on  the  orang-outang,  17, 
18  and  n.;  on  the  advantages  of  savage  life,  19,  20;  on  the 
decline  of  civilization,  19  j^.;  on  the  human  race,  22,  23; 
mentioned,   24,   26. 

Montagu,  Elizabeth,  and  Ann  Yearsley,  100  j^.;  mentioned,  99. 

Montesquieu,   Baron   de,  42. 

Moore,  John,  Zeluco,   107. 

More,  Hannah,  letter  of  Walpole  to,  94;  and  Ann  Yearsley,  100, 
102,  103.  J'y        > 

Mulgrave,  Lord,  77. 

Napoleon  I,  54,  55. 

Nature,  return  to,  5.     And  see  State  of  Nature. 

Neilson,  William  A.,  quoted,  105. 

Oglethorpe,  James,  on  luxury,  1,  2,  3,  4. 

Omai,  South  Sea  Islander,  in  London,  8,  27,  28,  75  ff. ;  portraits  of, 
76,  77;  no  attempt  to  educate,  79;  his  '* poetic  mind,''  80, 
81;  his  singing,  82-84;  return  to  South  Seas,  86;  death, 
88  and  n.;  not  the  ideal  man,  89. 

Omiah.     See  Omai. 

Omiah's  Farewell,  78. 

Orang-outang,  Monboddo  on  the,  16  n.,  17,  18  and  n. 

Ossian,  poems  of,  66,  71,  100.     And  see  Macpherson,  James. 

Otaheite,  6,  12. 

Otaheite   (poem),  10,  11. 

Paoli,  Pasquale,  his  character,  and  position  in  Corsica,  41,  42; 
and  Mrs.  Macaulay's  pamphlet,  43,  44;  Burnaby,  quoted,  on 
his  projects,  45;  and  Boswell,  47  ff.,  54;  struggles  in  vain 
against  French,  53;  a  refugee  in  England,  54;  and  Napoleon, 
55;  mentioned,  36  w.,  56. 

Percy,  Thomas,  Five  Pieces  of  Bunic  Poetry,  72;  Beliqiies  of  An- 
cient Poetry,  72. 

Peter  the  Wild  Boy,  6,  14. 

Poetry,  and  civilisation,  3-5;  and  the  Corsican  collapse,  56  ff.;  in 
Mid-Eighteenth  Century,  62,  63;    and  liberty,  64,   65. 

Polignac,   Cardinal,   15. 

Pope,  Alexander,  106. 

Portland,  Duchess  of,  101,  102. 

Eaikes,   Eobert,   102. 

Eamsay,  Allan,  105. 

Retz,  Cardinal  de,  49. 

Review  of  the  Conduct  of  Pasquale  Paoli,  A.,  42. 

Reyolds,  Sir  .Joshua,  portrait  of  Omai,  77;  and  frontispiece. 

Richardson,   Samuel,   107. 


INDEX  117 

Eights  of  man,  Natttral,  33. 

Eobertson,  William,  14. 

Romantic  Movement,  the,  31. 

Eossetti,  Dante  G.,  85. 

Eousseau,  Jean  Jacques,  influence  of,  in  England,  12,  13;  Social 
Contract,  33,  34;  his  unfinished  scheme  of  government  for 
Corsica,  34:  ff.,  39,  40;  mentioned,  22,  23  w.,  24,  32,  41,  43,  44, 
45,  46,  47,  48. 

Sandwich,  Countess  of,  28,  78. 

Sandwich,  Earl  of,  78. 

Savages,  revival  of  interest  in  the,  73  n. ;  the  ideal,  88,  89. 

Savage  Girl,  the.     See  Le  Blanc,  Mile. 

Savage  life,  Monboddo  on,  19,  20;  Boswell  on,  24;  and  civilised 

life,  difference  between,  5,  8,  9  and  n.,  13,  25  ff. 
Shenstone,  William,  97,  98,  106. 
Smith,  Edward,  Life  of  Sir  J.  Batiks,  80  n. 
Smollett,  Tobias,  Humphry  ClinTcer,  73;  mentioned,  107. 
South  Sea  Islands,  8  ff. 
Southerne,   Thomas,  OroonoTco,  74. 
Spencer,   Herbert,   14. 
State  of  Nature,  5,  8,  13,  31. 
Stendhal,  De,  Vie  de  Napoleon,  38,  55. 
Sterne,  Laurence,  Tristram  Shandy,  108,  109. 
Swinburne,  Algernon  C,  quoted,  110. 

Tahitan  music,  84,  85. 

Tahiti.    See  Othaheite. 

Tennyson,  Alfred,  Lord,  90. 

Thomson,  James,  104,  106. 

Thoreau,  Henry  D.,  31. 

Thrale,  Hester  Lynch,  entertains  Omai,  77,  78;  mentioned,  19  n.,  97. 

Tongan  Islands,  8. 

Townsend,  C.  W.,  Captain  Cartwright,  etc.,  27  n. 

Trevelyan,  Sir  George  O.,  Early  History  of  C.  J.  Fox,  53,  54. 

Wallis,  Samuel,  5,  6. 

Walpole,  Horace,  quoted,  9,  43,  94,  103;   The  Castle  of  Otranto, 

107;   mentioned,  101,  102. 
Woodhouse,  James,  the  *' Poetical  Shoemaker,"  97-99,  104. 
Wordsworth,  William,  31,  91. 

Yearsley,   Ann,   the   "Poetical   Milk-woman,"    99-103. 
Young,  Edward,   106. 


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